Q: Of the publication options offered by the journal, which one should I choose?
My paper has been accepted and the journal has offered me the following publication options: (1) Publish your article open access with Springer’s Open Choice option (if the journal is not a fully open access one). (2) Transfer the copyright of your article (if you don’t publish open access). (3) Order printing of figures in color. (4) Order paid offprints in addition to your free (electronic) offprint. Which option should I go for?
Congratulations on the acceptance of your paper! Here are my suggestions regarding the publication options offered by the journal:
1) The advantage of open access is that your article will be freely available which would probably improve its chances of being read and cited. However, you should opt for open access only if you are willing to pay the fee.
2) If you do not wish to pay the fee, you will have to transfer the copyright to the journal. In this case, you are not publishing open access.
3) You can decide whether you should pay a fee to get the figures published in color. However, I would suggest that you pay only if printing figures in grayscale would mean loss of data. For instance, if you have some cell staining image, then you might need to print in color, but if it is a graph, where all the symbols are well-defined, it should not matter if the figure is in color or gray. So in that case, there’s no point in paying the fee.
4) I do not think you really need offprints these days. You can take printouts from the electronic version whenever you want. But in case you want hard copies for special reasons, you can place an order for them on payment of some charges.
This content belongs to the Journal Selection Stage