1. Find information about a journal on its website:

• Are there any documentation on mission statement, scope, policy, and submission requirements?
• Does the journal website provide information about the publisher?
• Are articles peer-reviewed? How does the journal handle the peer-review process?
• Who are the editors and members of the editorial board?
• What is the copyright agreement?
• Do you need to pay for an article processing charge in order to publish your article?
• What about the quality of articles in this journal?
• Has the journal had an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number)?
• Is this journal registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals?
• Is this journal a member of Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association?
• Is the journal a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)?

2. Journal impact

Use the following key tools to find journal impact metrics, ranking, and to compare your targeted journal with others within the same discipline: 

• Journal Citation Reports (JCR) - evaluate and compare journals using citation data
• Compare Journals in Scopus - compare and analyse up to 10 journals
• Scopus Journal Metrics - search for journal metrics - CiteScore, SNIP and SJR
• SCIMago Journal & Country Rank
• Find more details on our online guide Research Impact

3. Indexing

Check whether your chosen journal is indexed by following library databases or Google Scholar:

• Scopus
• Web of Science
• Google Scholar
• Ulrichsweb: Global Serials Directory
• Other databases, such as EBSCO databases, ProQuest databases, Wiley Online Library, etc.

4. Do your own research

• Ask around - Your colleagues may know the journal.
• Check who have published in this journal - Well-known authors? Your colleagues or other researchers you known?

5. Think, Check, Submit 

The Think,Check, Submit website provides a checklist for assessing the credentials of a journal or publisher.

6. Find journals' policies on SHERPA

Many journals including some prestigious journals provide OA publishing options to authors . The following are some well-known OA journals that you may publish with:

There are some publishers acting unethically especially when it comes to OA journal publishing. Predatory journals may have these common issues:

• misleading metrics
• hijacked version of other well published journals
• fake editorial boards
• reproduce articles from other academic journals.
• sending spam emails to invite researchers to publish articles with their journals.

You may like to read the following recent studies on the issues of the increasing number of predatory open access articles:

• Cenyu Shen and Bo-Christer Björk, "Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics", published in the open access journal BMC Medicine.
• Leslie H. Nicoll and Peggy L. Chinn. Caught in the trap: the allure of deceptive publisher, published in Nurse Author & Editor, 2015, 25(4).
• Christine Laine and Margaret A. Winker. Identifying predatory or pseudo-journals, published on the World Association of Medical Editors website.

Benefits of OA publishing:

• Reach a more diverse audience and disadvantaged communities
• Research shows that publishing via OA leads to increased rates of citation
• OA enhances universities research profiles 
• Publicly funded research should be made publicly accessible
• Research funders will achieve better returns from their investment
• Quicker turn-around time

Find more details on our Open Access guide.