Both traditional subscription journals and Open Access journals should be evaluated for quality before manuscripts are submitted - like all other journals, the website for the particular Open Access journal will tell you information about the publishing and peer-review process they undertake.
No single criterion below indicates whether or not a publication is reputable, but the balance of positive and negative indicators may inform the evaluation. If further help is needed, please contact us.
Quantitative measures of a journal's importance like journal impact factor are not always available for many disciplines, especially the humanities. As a result, any attempt to determine which journals in subjects like literature and philosophy are more highly regarded than others must rely on qualitative criteria.
Predatory publishers operate substandard quality journals while charging authors substantial fees to publish their research. Editorial standards are often low, peer-review process are of poor-quality (or don't exist at all), and the journals are not indexed in scholarly databases.
You can use the information below to assess a publisher and verify their standards.
The Think. Check. Submit. checklist is a useful tool for assessing journal publishers:
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