Resources to help determine the quality of Open Access journals

[Edit: Richard White, from my old parish at Otago University pointed out this is a resource to discover good OA journals that are reputably open – their content may still be as dodgy as ever.  Hopefully though, authentically Open means higher transparency, and a higher standard of work. 26 Sept 2017 ]

I recently had to compile a list of what to look for in an OA journal at work, and I thought I’d publish it here too.

Here’s the list of things I use to determine if it’s a ‘good’ OA journal:

• Directory of Open Access Journals
  • https://doaj.org/
• If the journal is not on the list itself, their best practice guidelines are worth looking at
  • https://doaj.org/bestpractice
• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association Code of Conduct is the gold standard:
  • http://oaspa.org/membership/code-of-conduct/
• Sherpa RoMEO is useful: anything that has a blue categorisation is excellent. Green, maybe.
  • http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php?la=en&fIDnum=&mode=simple
• Beall’s List (as much as I don’t like blacklists) is worth checking as well. I would check out the publisher in detail and look for any commentary on the net about it before I followed it.
  • Publishers https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/
  • Journals https://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/

My personal take of what to look for is any journal that solicits articles on its web front page, in larger or equal type to announcing its most recent issue, is problematic, and worth a further look to see if it is legitimate.