Research Guides: Publishing Strategies: Quality Publishers & Journals

Quality Publishers

What makes a High Quality Journal, beyond well-known reputable publishers and impact factors? (For more in impact factor, check out the Metrics Research Guide).

Use tools (linked in a box below) like the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), The Journal Guide, ROAD, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory and SHERPA/RoMEO to investigate the quality and publishing practices of a journal.

From Berger & Cirasella, 2015, A Journal must:
- Be chiefly scholarly
- Make content available without embargo (immediately)
- Have an editor, editorial board and peer review structure (even better if this structure is transparent) for quality control
- Have an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number)
- Engage in transparency around APCs

How to Assess a Journal
By CARL (Canadian Association of Research Libraries)

Think. Check. Submit.

ThinkCheckSubmit.org
Sharing research results with the world is key to the progress of your discipline and career. But with so many publications, how can you be sure you can trust a particular journal? Follow this check list to make sure you choose trusted journals for your research.

Open Access

Open Access & Open Data Publishing

ARTiFACTS
A simple, user-friendly platform, purpose built for academic and scientific research that leverages blockchain technology. Researchers can record a permanent, valid, and immutable chain of records in real-time, from the earliest stages of research for all scientific and scholarly artifacts, including citing/attribution transactions. Compatible with open and traditional publishing models.

arXiv.org
Open access to over one million e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance, Statistics, Electrical Engineering and Systems Science, and Economics.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
2,125 free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.

How Papers Get Into PMC
A paper can get into PubMed Central (PMC) as either the final published version of the article deposited directly in PMC by the publisher, or an author manuscript version (i.e., peer-reviewed, accepted manuscript) through NIHMS.

Mendeley Data
A secure cloud-based repository where you can search and find data sets and store your own data, ensuring it is easy to share, access and cite, wherever you are.
OSF Preprints
Aggregates search results from various preprint providers. Over a million preprints can be searched by author, keywords, subject, preprint server, and recent contribution. Contributors are encouraged to provide supplemental data and materials. Existing OSF project are linked to preprints when relevant.

Open Science Framework
OSF is a free and open source project management repository that supports researchers across their entire project lifecycle.
ScienceMatters
Publishing Platform for single, valid observations (triple blind peer review), pre-registering hypotheses, data important for reproducibility, and more.

Open Policy Finder
Lists journal publisher copyright and self-archiving policies including information on paid access options with direct links to the relevant publisher policies.
UND Scholarly Commons
The institutional repository is a service of the University of North Dakota libraries. Research and scholarly output included here has been selected and deposited by the individual university departments and centers on campus.

Journal Tools

Tools for finding Journal Information

Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory
Easy to use database detailing over 3000,000 serials in more than 900 subject areas including ISSN, OA or subscription-based, peer-reviewed or not, place of publication, website, publisher, reviews written by librarians and abstracting, indexing and full-text database coverage and more.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. There are now 2,125 journals in the directory. Nearly 91,000 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

ROAD - Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources
ROAD covers different types of online scholarly resources: journals, conferences proceedings, academic repositories, monographic series, and scholarly blogs (since the end of 2014)
SHERPA/RoMEO
A free, open access database of Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving.
Crossref Title List
Crossref's journal membership title list.
JournalGuide
Can be sorted by discipline.

Journal Finder Tools for Publishing

Edanz Journal Selector
Data, including Impact Factors, are collected from publicly available information and are updated regularly. Impact Factors are based on information reported by a journal and may differ form the latest official figures. Official Journal Impact Factors are compiled by Thomson Reuters in their annual Journal Citation Reports®.
Elsevier Journal Finder
Elsevier® Journal Finder helps you find journals that could be best suited for publishing your scientific article. Also read the Journal Authors page for step by step instructions for publishing with Elsevier.
ERIH PLUS
Humanities and Social Sciences approved journals list according to ERICH PLUS criteria.
Springer journal suggester
The Springer Journal Suggester uses semantic technology to help you quickly choose the Springer journal that is right for your paper.

Book Publishers

Research Impact - metrics / Book impact
See this page for finding quality book publishers.

Current Hot Topics

New Assessment Process Boosts Credibility of Developing-world Journals
By SIÂN HARRIS on The Scholarly Kitchen blog.

Publishing Strategies

Undergraduate Research

Lists of Quality Publishers