Open Access & Open Educational Resources

BEWARE!  About predatory publishers:

• Take advantage of scholars who want to publish in open access journals

• Corrupt and exist only to charge an article processing fee in the way that some Open Access journals operate

• Often invite scholars to publish with no initial mention of an author fee

How do you check the authority of these publishers?

• Look for the publisher's full and verifiable contact information, including address on the journal site.  Be cautious if only a web contact form is provided

• Does the editorial board list recognize experts with full affiliations?  Ask them about their experiences with the journal or publisher.

• Check that the journal prominently displays its policy for author fees

• Be wary of email invitations to submit to journals or become editorial board members

• Please read some of the journal's published articles and assess their quality.  Contact past authors to ask about their experience

• Check that the journal's peer review process is clearly described and try to confirm that a claimed impact factor is correct

• Is the journal a member of an industry association such as the Directory of Open Access Journals or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association?   (doaj.org; oaspa.org)

Faculty Publishing Resources

• JournalGuide
  This is a free tool that helps researchers to evaluate scholarly journals. In addition to searching by journal name, category, or publisher, authors can use the title and abstract of a paper to discover journals that have already published articles on similar topics. By matching journals to a paper's content, researchers can see which journals would be most likely to have interest in their story.