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Guide to: Predatory Publishing

Information and resources to better understand this issue in scholarly communication.

Resources for determining legitimate or predatory journals

  • DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) - DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
  • Beall’s List - List of potential , probable or possible predatory open access journals, compiled by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado.  This list ceased to be active in 2017;  the link is to an archived version.
  • University of New England journal evaluation - Checklist of questions to ask before selecting journal in which to publish your research
  • GVSU Open Access Journal Quality Indicators -  Criteria to seek or avoid when evaluating  open access publications.
  • Journalguide.com  - Search, filter, sort, and compare journals from more than 46,000 titles across all academic fields.  Journals have been verified as legitimate and use SNIP (Source-Normalized Impact per Paper) as a measure of a journal’s impact.
  • Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing - Put forth by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
  • Identifying Predatory or Pseudo-Journals - Posted February 18, 2017 by Christine Laine and Margaret A. Winker on teh World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) website
  • Scopus CiteScore comprehensive, transparent, current and free metrics for serial titles in Scopus. Sometimes a journal will be included in either Sources or JCR but not both, so it might be useful to check both resources  when evaluating a journal.
  • Cabell's Offers a fee quote for obtaining journal information, evaluation metrics and submission details for a requested journal. The  White List and Black List are useful tools for journal evaluation.
  • Google Scholar Metrics - Has an h-index metrics system for evaluating journals.

Support

For help selecting an appropriate journal for your manuscript, guidance on avoiding predatory publishers, and other information about open access publishing, contact your library liaison or the Digital Scholarship Librarian (Lisa Villa, lvilla@holycross.edu, 508-793-2767).