A good place to start is a new FAQ put together by Paul Frantz, the Libraries’ Head of Reference.

Open Access journals aren’t very different from other journals. The defining difference is that OA journals publish online and don’t charge for subscriptions or access. That’s great for visibility — an article published in an OA journal is available to a broad range of scholars and members of the public, whereas many subscription journals are available only in a couple of hundred academic library collections. Perhaps as a result, some studies have found that articles in OA journals are on average cited more than those in comparable traditional journals.

But, even with the Internet, publishing still isn’t free. Many — not all — OA journals, particularly in the sciences, pay for their costs by charging author’s a fee for acceptance, much like the page charges that journals often levied during the last century. Fees range per article from $100 to $2000 or more. There’s some risk that unscrupulous publishers would use the OA model to create a vanity press where authors pay to publish, but even worse would be the surprise you’d get after your manuscript was accepted if you didn’t expect an author processing charge. The moral:

1. When submitting to an OA journal, check the instructions for authors carefully to see if there is any author fee. Also, the Directory of Open Access Journals notes whether any particular OA journal has a fee.
2. If you want to publish but are deterred by a a fee, see if the library can help. The UO Libraries has a fund available to help cover these costs. See http://libweb.uoregon.edu/scis/oaps.html.

The typical mechanism is simple — a “publisher” who announces a large number of new peer reviewed open access journals and solicits manuscript submissions.  Accepted articles are charged a moderate “author processing fee.”  The problem is that the journals may not really exist at all, or may list editorial boards with members who have never heard of the journal, or may simply practice minimal review and end up being simply a vanity press.  Such vanity press journals are of course not unique to open access, but the novelty and strengths — easy web based publication– of OA seem to be attracting scammers.

This is the flip side of my previous post on OA journal assessment.  That post looked at some techniques identifying stellar examples of OA journals and included a sample of top journals.  This new trend makes it clear that scholars also need to be careful to avoid scams.

So what’s an author to do if she gets an advertisement for a new OA journal?  The answer is clear — caveat auctor.  Do some investigation before assuming that this is a legitimate publishing opportunity.  Some things to try:

1. when you google the title of the journal, is the first hit the journal website, or is it a blog discussing why this journal is a fraud?
2. take a look at the journal website.  Does it list an editor and/or editorial board members you know?  If so, contact them and find out whether they think this is a new and legitimate journal.  Is it transparent about any author fees and the peer review process?
3. start by asking whether the journal has actually published any issues.  If it has, the gold standard is to read an article or two and assess quality for yourself.  If it has been in existence for a few years it may have a Journal Impact Factor or similar citation index (higher is better).  You can look up JIFs  using Journal Citation Reports.
4. check whether the journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals.  If not, it’s not a recognized open access journal.
5. check to see if this journal is listed in mainstream library journal databases.  If it’s brand new it probably won’t be, so this isn’t a definitive test.  It will probably have an ISSN and hence an entry in Ulrich’s, so you can get some information such as the publisher and publisher address.  Beware cultural chauvinism, but also be suspicious of journals that claim to be first world but have a publisher’s address in Bangladesh.
6. check whether the publisher appears in Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers.  Again not definitive since that list is one man’s opinions (see the comments to his blog post for discussion), but it’s a good start.  Another good test is whether the publisher is a member of the Open Access Publishers Association, since that organization is attempting to apply reasonable standards to weed out the dregs.
7. ask whether the journal website promises more than it can reasonably deliver.  Be particularly suspicious of new very-broadly interdisciplinary journals (“International Journal of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education”???).  What editor has the expertise even to find competent reviewers across the entire range of scholarship?  And a journal that claims 1 week peer review almost certainly is lying.  There are a very few high quality journals such as PLoS One that are practicing expedited peer review, but their review cycles are typically in the several-week range at best.  Again, transparency is important — does the journal provide a credible story for why it can do rapid peer review?
8. ask a subject specialist for assistance.

It’s a good idea to distinguish between spam and scam.  To be sure, most of the scam OA journals are using email spam to solicit large numbers of unsuspecting authors or potential reviewers.  But some legitimate journals — particularly new ones — err in that direction too since they have few other ways to get visibility.  Most of us believe that new journals are usually a good thing for a discipline since they may represent new approaches and reconceptualizations.  It’s a tough call where to draw the line.

One approach is to look at statistics that measure the average number of citations that have occurred to articles published in the journal, though there are lots of variants on that general theme.

OA ranking using Scopus and SJR

One site that ranks journals is SCImago, which uses citation data from SCIverse Scopus (an Elsevier database).

If we look just at open access journals (which for convenience I’ll define as journals that appear in the Directory of Open Access Journals), then we find that there are about 7300 open access journals.  By comparison, Ulrich’s lists about 65,000 peer reviewed scholarly journals of any kind, so about 10% of all journals appear to be open access.  A small subset of these journals have been indexed with all of their citations noted.  For instance, SCIverse indexes about 18,000 journals, mostly in the sciences and engineering, but doesn’t keep track of whether particular journals are open access.  For these 18,000 journals, SCImago computes something they call “SCImago Journal Rankings” (SJRs) based on the number of times citations to the journal have appeared in other indexed journals.

If we combine the two sources of information (OA status from DOAJ, and SJR from SCImago), we find that about 2000 of those 18,000 journals are open access, and hence have SJR numbers.  I’m attaching a table listing the  50 open access journals with the highest SJR values as of 1 March 2012.  Some observations

1. The highest ranked journal (Cancer Journal for Clinicians) has an SJR value of 9.895 and a Journal Impact Factor of 94.333.  According to SCImago, it is the 4th most heavily cited journal among ALL journals indexed.  With 62 citations per article based on SCImago calculations, its articles on average appear to be the most highly cited of any scholarly journal of any kind.
2. The vast majority of highly ranked OA journals are in biomedicine, though there are a few exceptions (Optics Express, PLoS One, New Journal of Physics).
3. Looking at the whole sample of 2014, the vast majority of titles are still in STEM disciplines, presumably because  Sciverse mostly indexes science journals.  So using this data might be useful to identify high-impact journals in Chemistry, but not in Political Science.

Ranking based on Article Impact

SJR is only one of many citation-based metrics.  eigenfactor.org has computed a similar metric, Article Impact, based on citation data from ISI Web of Science.  The list of highest-impact OA journals overlaps but is somewhat different.

More Information

Resources downloadable from my website:

• Tables of the 50 highest ranked OA journals, ranked by SJR and by Article Impact.
• A spreadsheet containing all 2014 OA journals rated by SCImago, with additional information such as the subject area of the journal.
• A spreadsheet containing 625 journals rated by eigenfactor.org

I’ll follow up with other ways to identify high-impact journals in other posts.