Publishing Tips

Characteristics and tactics of fraudulent journals: 

• Publish journals which are improbable combinations of disciplines
  • Questionable journals will publish articles on nearly any topic
• Journal scope statement is vague or absent
• Use spam to solicit papers
• Publish papers which have already been published elsewhere
• Lead authors repeated in the same issue
• Journal website has false or very little contact information
• Little or no instructions for authors information 
• Information on peer review and copyright is unavailable or unclear
• Promise peer-review and publication "the next day" or some other unlikely time frame
• List members of the editorial board who may not actually be on the board
• Have 'sales' on the cost of publishing articles
• Misspellings and/or bad grammar
• Market non-existant impact factors
• False claims of database indexing  

Other disreputable journal tactics:

• Adept at mimicry and may appear at first to be a professionally created and managed peer-reviewed journal site
• Journal titles are often very similar to reputable legitimate journals
• Websites can look polished

Be aware, these journal articles will appear in Google Scholar results.

Determine if an open access journal or publisher is credible by doing a little investigating:

1. Go to the journal's website and review the journal's scope as described on the website. It should be clearly stated and well-defined.

2. Journal has an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number, e.g., 1234-5678) usually listed on the homepage or the About this journal webpage.

3. Check the journal's editorial board. The editor and the board should be recognized experts in their fields with full affiliations listed on the website. Verify the affiliation and check the board members' listing on their institutional website. If they are a member of the editorial board, they will likely list the service on their CV or scholarly achievements section. If not, contact some of board members and ask about their experience with the journal or publisher.

4. Examine articles that appear in the journal. The audience should be researchers and practitioners. The articles should be high caliber and demonstrate excellent research, offer compelling arguments, be within the scope of the journal and meet the standards of the discipline. Additionally, articles should have DOIs (Digital Object Identifier, e.g., doi:10.1111/j.1742-9544.2011.00054.x)

5. Check the peer-review policy. Policy should be easily accessible on the website and clearly state the peer-review process. The time frame for the process should be logical - typically a few weeks to several months (not days or hours).    

6. Check for the author's publication fee schedule. Charges and fees should be clearly stated up front, prior to manuscript submission. They should be easily located on the website. Fee amounts are not an indicator of credibility.

7. Check the rights for use and re-use at the article level. Rights for use and re-use of the article content should be clearly indicated (e.g., Creative Commons CC BY license).

8. Check if the journal is included in subject databases and/or indexes. Journals will frequently include a list of the databases in which they can be found. If the journal claims to be included in CINAHL, IEEE or another academic database, verify the truth of the claim.

Note: Google Scholar is not a database nor is it indexed; therefore, disregard journal claims of "indexing" in Google Scholar. They are meaningless.

9. Is the journal affiliated with or sponsored by an established scholarly society or academic institution?

10. Is the journal a member of an open access industry association that vets its members? E.g., Directory of Open Access Journals or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. See links below.

Open access publishing industry associations

Is the open access publisher a membership of one or more of the following organizations?

Databases  

Check the publications list in academic databases for inclusion of a journal. Subscription databases have evaluated the journals they index.

Examples:

ProQuest databases:

EBSCO databases:

Journal Finders:

Identifying Journals for Manuscript Submission tab resources can also be used to verify a journal's credibility.

Journal Directories:

Use directories to check for journal inclusion. Journals that are included in these resources have been assessed for credibility.

Tools and Checklists for Evaluating Journals