Evaluating Journals for Quality and Legitimacy

Open access (OA) refers to freely available, digital, online information. Open access scholarly literature is free of charge and often carries less restrictive copyright and licensing barriers than traditionally published works, for both the users and the authors. 

While OA is a newer form of scholarly publishing, many OA journals comply with well-established peer-review processes and maintain high publishing standards.

These journals publish high quality, refereed scholarly content, that is openly available online for users to download, learn from, and build upon.  Typically open access publications allow the author(s) of an article to maintain copyright ownership of their work, and articles are usually published with a Creative Commons License allowing the article to be freely accessed and shared.

Because OA Journals are free to access and use, many open access publishers may require an article processing charge (APC) to cover journal production costs (editing, peer review, hosting, archiving, preservation) with scholarly publishing.  These charges replace subscription fees and shift the burden of publishing costs from users to authors.

Because some OA journals charge these fees, there are misconceptions that authors are participating in “pay to play” publishing or circumventing the peer-review processes of traditional scholarly publications.  High quality open access journals have similar vetting and scholarly integrity processes as traditional publishers and will require submissions to undergo peer-review.  Authors who publish research in open access publications are not cheating the tenure and promotion process.

Journal publication fees, or APC’s vary greatly.  Be sure to look at the “information for authors” or similar sections of a journal’s website to find their fee structure.

There are many reasons why authors should pay an APC:
Visibility: Typically paying an APC leads to increased readership of your article through open access. Your colleagues at universities and colleges worldwide, non-profits, government agencies, and the general public will have immediate access to your work, regardless of their library's ability to afford journal subscriptions. Increased access has been shown to lead to increased citation rates as well.

Journal quality: Authors may find that top-ranking journals charge APCs (e.g. publishers such as PLoS, BMC, Copernicus).

Copyright: APC-funded articles often include provisions that allow the author to retain more rights to their work and also give readers additional usage rights.

Compliance: If you are funded by a US Federal agency, you may find that publishing in an OA journal (with or without APCs) helps satisfy requirements to share the results of your research with US taxpayers.

Many authors will build the cost of publishing in an Open Access Journal into their grant budget and use these funds to cover an article processing charge.

Publishing in an Open Access medium benefits both authors and content users and can help accomplish the following:

• Promote faster transmission of ideas
• Increase citation counts for authors
• Increase visibility to research
• Reduce inequalities in access to knowledge and researchers in developing countries can see your work.
• Give the tax-payer access to tax-funded research
• Compliance with grant funding rules

Myth:  Open Access is a subversive movement that will ultimately undermine our copyright system.

Fact: Open Access works entirely within our current copyright system. Your work as an author is copyrighted to you the moment you fix it in a tangible medium of expression (typing it into Word and clicking Save, for example). You retain that copyright until you give some or all of it away.
 

Myth: Open Access will destroy the scholarly publishing system and cause journals to fail.

Fact: New models are emerging in scholarly publishing. One safeguard that many journals implement is a time-limited embargo on open access. Journals recoup most of the publishing costs within the first year of publication. Articles can then be made open access without loss of revenue.

Many journal publishers (Oxford, Cambridge, Wiley, Sage, etc.) have also decided to change their business model from subscription-only, cost-recovery, to a hybrid model, in which open access articles are published alongside traditional ones. Article processing fees are charged to recoup the publishers' costs. Hybrid journal policies should be examined carefully, however; some allow free access to the article but do not allow any of the derivative uses associated with true open access.
 

Myth: Open Access journals are not peer-reviewed and are of low quality.

Fact: Open Access journals, just like any other journal, can be peer-reviewed or not, depending on the journal policy. The fact that the journal is open access says nothing about whether it is peer-reviewed. Most scholarly open access journals are peer-reviewed.
 

Myth: If I want to publish open access I have to submit my article to an open access journal.

Fact: You can submit and publish your article in any journal you like and still make it available open access in our institutional repository, Cardinal Scholar. Be sure to keep the original author’s manuscript and accepted manuscript versions of your articles.  Many commercial journals will allow a version of your article to be deposited in an open access repository.  Contact the Copyright and Scholarly Communications Office at BSU Libraries for help in identifying the publisher copyright policies for repository archiving. 

Myth: If I try to retain some rights, publishers will think I am difficult and will not want to publish my work.

Fact: Publishers are very used to dealing with these requests at this point. Far from being unusual, the retention of rights by authors is becoming a mainstream choice.  Approximately 72% of academic journals allow some form or open access archiving without any use of an addendum to the contract.  For a searchable database of publisher policies about copyright and archiving, explore the SHERPA/RoMEO site.

Myth:  Publishing my work open access is a nice, altruistic thing to do, but there is nothing in it for me.

Fact: Open access publishing does help address inequities in access to knowledge globally. Few people in the world have access to the resources we have here at Ball State University. But, in addition, most studies show a clear citation advantage for open access publications. Open access publications are cited more often than those that are subscription-only and citation counts are still important factors in tenure and promotion decisions.

Much of the information from this section is adapted from this guide from Boston College Libraries.

Arxiv is a repository of electronic preprints, or e-prints, in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, and statistics.

SocArXiv is an open archive of the social sciences

Google Scholar is a free search engine that allows you to search for scholarly content across multiple disciplines, formats, and sources.

Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is an open access repository of abstracts and full text papers by social science researchers from across the world.

PubMed is a free resource that includes over 24 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Coverage includes the fields of biomedicine and health, portions of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an online directory that indexes and provides access to quality open access, peer-reviewed journals.

OAIster is a union catalog of over 30 million records representing open access resources from collections worldwide.

Bielefield Academic Search Engine (BASE) is a freely available search engine for academic open access resources on the web.

Unpaywall harvests Open Access content from 50,000 publishers and repositories creating a database with access to over twenty million Open Access articles. If researchers hit a paywall the Unpaywall browser extension searches this extensive database and notifies you if it locates freely accessible full-text versions of the article.

The Open Access Button searches across the web for a freely accessible full-text version of any article.  You can search for articles on the Open Access Button website or download the browser extension.