Academic Journals: How to Choose Where to Publish

Quality of a journal depends on the editor, editorial board, peer-reviewers, and the publisher which oversees the entire publication process. To find high-quality journals, use

• Ulrich's Global Serials Directory
• DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals
• InCites Journal Citation Report
• Scopus

Predatory Open Access Journals

When considering placing your article with any publisher that requires up-front payment of an author fee, please be aware that there are some unethical publishers who operate under a Gold OA banner but do not, in fact, really provide significant editorial oversight and peer review. Before deciding whether or not to publish with any journal, we suggest checking Cabell's Predatory Report. Alternatively, you can also check the names of editorial board members, editor(s), get information about the publisher, and/or read some of the journal's articles to get a sense of quality. Please reach out to us if you need help with this process.​

Friendly to Authors

If you go with a non-open access journal, look for a friendly publishing agreement that allows you to keep your copyright and grants permission to the publisher. A good example is this wording from a sample agreement from Taylor & Francis: 

LICENCE AGREEMENT This is a licence agreement under which you, the author, retain copyright in your article, and grant (hereinafter ‘the Society’) a licence to allow us and our publisher Informa UK Limited registered in England under no. 1072954 trading as Taylor & Francis Group, Registered Office: Mortimer House, 37–41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH (hereinafter ‘Taylor & Francis’) to publish your article, including abstract, tables, figures, data, and supplemental material hosted by our publisher, as the Version of Record (VoR) in the Journal