According to the Cambridge Dictionary, self-publishing is regarded as the act of arranging or paying for one's ‘own book to be published, rather than having it done by a publisher’ [1]. Whether it be a fictional story or a scientific study, such an option is often considered to be the very last resort for authors who have previously failed to find a (respectable) publisher. In contemporary scientific research, self-publishing can happen to be conflated with other editorial phenomena such as predatory publications, which, while retaining some aspects of the traditional publishing business, are in fact self-publishing platforms [2].
