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| Tom HillPublisher and Chief ExecutiveContact Tom | |
Tom works with other staff, contractors and with Editors in Chief, Associate Editors and editorial boards on journal development, marketing, general operations management and new business development. Find out more on his LinkedIn profile. Tom also writes Libertas Academica's Publishers' Blog. |
Sandi is the Managing Editor of all Libertas Academica journals. She over-sees editorial operations, working with Editors in Chief and Associate Editors. She also manages production contractors.
Jan coordinates incoming manuscripts and peer review. She works closely with authors, reviewers, and editorial board members and Editors in Chief.
If you know the name of the person you wish to contact use their email address, which will follow this pattern: firstname.lastname@la-press.com. If you don’t receive a prompt reply or if you don’t know the name of the person you need to contact, use our contact page.
We can be contacted by phone at (+64) 9 476 3930 and by fax at (+64) 9 353 1397.
Our postal address is:
PO Box 300-874
Albany 0752
Auckland,
New Zealand
Libertas Academica is recognised by SHERPA/RoMEO as a "green" open access publisher because we permit authors to archive their work before and after publication. We are also a "gold" open access publisher because we impose no embargo on access to papers after publication; papers are freely available to all internet users as soon as they are published.
Readers may read all articles published in Libertas Academica without any barriers to access. We also offer readers:
 | New articles in your in boxBe informed of new articles in the journal automatically! |
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 | The latest journal newsRead about the latest developments in the journal. |
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We offer a comprehensive set of standard services to all authors:
Copy editing
Reference formatting
Manuscript re-submission preparation
Immediate publication on acceptance
Our technical editors are available to review and correct the English in your manuscript.
| Location | Currency | Amount per double-spaced manuscript page |
| Authors in North America | US $ | 18.00 |
| Authors in Japan | ¥ | 2,000.00 |
| Authors in United Kingdom | £ | 12.00 |
| Authors in rest of world | € | 13.00 |
| Location | Currency | Amount per double-spaced manuscript page |
| Authors in North America | US $ | 18.00 |
| Authors in Japan | ¥ | 2,000.00 |
| Authors in United Kingdom | £ | 12.00 |
| Authors in rest of world | € | 13.00 |
Our business partner can prepare your response to your peer review report.
| Location | Currency | Amount per word |
| Authors in North America | US $ | 0.18 |
| Authors in Japan | ¥ | 20.30 |
| Authors in United Kingdom | £ | 0.12 |
| Authors in rest of world | € | 0.14 |
We can provide an immediate provisional PDF as soon as your paper is accepted for publication.
| Location | Currency | Amount per manuscript |
| Authors in North America | US $ | 200 |
| Authors in Japan | ¥ | 19,000 |
| Authors in United Kingdom | £ | 140 |
| Authors in rest of world | € | 160 |
Distributing printed copies of your article is a great way to bring your article to the attention of your colleagues at your institution or during meetings and conferences. We can supply spine-bound, high resolution black and white or colour copies of your article in sharp digital reprography.
Other pages can also be added to the back or front of your article, such as your CV or biosketch, and covers and various delivery options are also available.
Place a no-obligation enquiry about optional services. You will receive a quote within two working days.
Optional services are available to everyone. You do not need to be intending to submit your paper to a Libertas Academica journal.
Peer review is the cornerstone of credible scholarly publishing. Your peer review will be undertaken with by two qualified and experienced reviewers, in collaboration with the journal's Editor in Chief or Associate Editor.
By using our custom-built web-based editorial platform we can remove many of the delays from peer review without compromising on quality.
You can be confident that your peer review will be fair and balanced. Our Fairness in Peer Review policy has two elements:
Specify each comment under appeal in the cover letter of your resubmitted manuscript and provide a clear explanation of why the comment is unfair, ill-founded or unobjective.
Authors may also appeal prior to re-submission by completing an appeal request.
We welcome proposals for new open access journals. Send your proposal to Tom Hill.
Subjects of interest
We are interested in all proposals, but we are particularly interested in journals in these areas:
| Adsorption Aging Alzheimer's disease Artificial intelligence Atomic force microscopy Biodiversity Biogeochemistry Biogeography Bioinformatics Biomaterials Biomechanics Biophysics Biotechnology Cancer Carbon nanotubes Catalysis Climate change Cognition Computational biology Computational chemistry Conservation biology Data mining Decision making Density functional theory Drug delivery Ecology Electrochemistry Epidemiology FMRI Gene expression Geochemistry GIS | Image processing Inflammation Information retrieval Machine learning Mass spectrometry Memory Microbial ecology Microfluidics Molecular biology Molecular dynamics Molecular evolution Nanoscience and nanoscience Neural networks Neuroscience Oxidative stress Photonics Phylogenetics Polymers Population genetics Quantum dots, information and optics Remote sensing Signal processing Signal transduction Spectroscopy Statistics Stem cells Superconductivity Supramolecular chemistry Surface chemistry Systematics Systems biology |
Development procedure
Initially your proposal will be evaluated against these criteria:
If we decide to accept the proposal and you wish to act as Editor in Chief, we will require the following:
The exceptional services we offer to authors, including quick turn-around times and fast and fair peer review, is also available to meeting organisers and other parties wishing to publish supplements.
Make your meeting proceedings available sooner and to a vast audience by publishing them as a supplement to a Libertas Academica open access journal.
Send your enquiry to Tom Hill to discuss how we can best meet your needs.
Open access removes the price and permission barriers from free access to scientific research:
Other open access publishers may apply slightly different terms. The Budapest Open Access Initiative explains this:
There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
The Bethesda and Berlin statements also comment on this point. For a work to be OA the copyright holder must consent to let readers:
copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship...
Collectively these three constitute the core definition of OA. However, OA journals are also required to provide immediate full-text access to published work rather than just abstracts or article metadata.
The following concepts which are associated with conventional non-OA publishing are compatible with OA:
The primary difference between OA publishing and non-OA publishing is that the costs associated with publishing the journal are paid by the authors rather than the readers and hence do not act as barriers to access.
There are two key aspects to how copyright relates to OA publishing.
The copyright holders (the authors) consent to unrestricted reading, downloading, copyrighting, sharing, storing, printing, searching and linking to the full text of the work. LA’s licence prevents misattribution and selective reuse to prevent plagiarism, misrepresentation and questionable scholarship.
Where an author has re-used content not in the public domain in an OA work, the consent of the copyright holder must be given.
Therefore, we can say that OA publishing is not comparable to peer-to-peer file sharing for science, and OA publishing is always voluntary.
In its conventional form OA publishing is also royalty-free. Authors effectively give their work to the world without expectation of payment. We believe that in the future it may be possible to publish text books in a manner resembling OA but with royalty payments made to the authors.
A major argument in favour of OA publishing is that publicly-funded research should be freely available. The US National Institutes of Health has a policy to require free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles that arise from its funding.
Of course, there are some exceptions to this:
While accessing OA journal content is without costs to readers, OA publishing is not truly free; it takes a different approach to covering the economic costs of production where readers are not charged and barriers to access are not created. In this sense OA publishing can be compared to radio or free-to-air television: those with an interest in disseminating information pay the cost of doing so in exchange for there being no barriers to accessing this information.
Although this means that authors pay a publication processing fee, in practice fees are normally paid by the author’s employer or funder or are waived, rather than being paid out of the author’s personal funds.
This economic basis means that our OA journals are sustainable in the long-term, whereas other OA journals supported by outside bodies rather than by publication processing fees paid by authors are subject to the continued favour of outside bodies to ensure their continued existence.
OA publishing is compatible with peer review and we insist on rigorous, objective peer review in all our journals. We use the same procedures, standards, and select our reviewers from the same sources as are used in conventional journals. As is the case with the authors, the reviewers donate their labour, but there are considerable costs involved in organising peer review. The costs involved are largely in the time and information technology required to distribute files, monitor progress and enforce deadlines, collating and distributing comments, facilitating communication and organising versions of manuscripts.
Authors gain by getting an audience for their work larger than any subscription journal can offer and increases its visibility and impact.
Readers gain barrier-free access to research material without library-imposed restrictions. OA published material is accessible from anywhere that a connection to the Internet is available via high-availability research tools such as Google and Entrez Pubmed, and this material is also freely applied to current and future indexing, mining, summarising, translating, querying, linking, recommending, alerting and aggregation tools, and other forms of data processing and analysis.
Teachers and their students gain free and equal access to content and negates the need for permissions to reproduce. Sharing material is simplified and free.
Libraries gain by avoiding budget restrictions and having to maintain publisher-imposed access policies. Librarians are able to enhance faculties’ access to research and thereby enhance their university’s research profile.
Universities gain by increasing the visibility of their faculty and reducing their subscription journal budget.
Funding agencies gain because OA publishing enhances the return on their research investment. Results of research are more widely accessible and more useful. Public funding agencies gain by tax-payers having access to publicly-funded research. Under conventional publishing, publishers are effectively given exclusive rights to profit from research paid for by tax payers.
As sources of research funding, governments also enjoy the benefits that funding agencies gain. OA also promotes the free sharing of information, a key characteristic of democratic governance.
All citizens gain by having access to peer-reviewed research which is generally not offered by public libraries. Access to such material provides citizens with a counter-point to questionable statements made in less credible sources. It also gives them access to research funded by their taxes. Under conventional publishing, publishers are effectively given exclusive rights to profit from research paid for by tax payers.
Libertas Academica Ltd is a privately held company. The owner is an experienced publisher of scientific, technical and medical journals. Libertas has no affiliations with any pharmaceutical company, charitable groups, government bodies etc and receives no funding or sponsorship from any other parties. We guard our independence jealously and are not obligated in a financial or any other sense to any individuals or groupings.
Libertas Academica staff, contractors, and external editorial participants are required to act in a professional, responsible manner at all times. Similarly, our website and editorial systems are designed with the expectation that they will perform appropriately at all times.
If you wish to make a complaint about any matter please complete this complaints form. Complaints may be anonymous if you wish.
Your complaint will be kept confidential and handled promptly. Where it concerns a business or internal staff matter it will be handled by the Publisher and Chief Executive, whereas if an editorial or journal-specific matter is involved the journal's Editor in Chief will be consulted.
An OAI-PMH is available. Contact us for more information.
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Copyright © 2010 Libertas Academica Ltd (except open access articles and accompanying metadata and supplementary files.)
