Predatory Publishing: Open Access Publishing

Here are indicators that a journal or publisher is not predatory:

• Scope of the journal is well-defined and clearly stated
• Journal’s primary audience is researchers/practitioners not authors
• Editor, editorial board are recognized experts in the field
• Journal is affiliated to or sponsored by an established scholarly society or academic institution
• Articles are within the scope of the journal and meet the standards writing and research in the discipline
• Any fees or charges for publishing in the journal are easily found on the journal web site and clearly explained
• Articles have DOIs
• Journal clearly indicates rights for use and re-use of content at article level (e.g., Creative Commons CC BY license)
• Journal has an ISSN (check the validity of the ISSN using ISSN Portal)
• Publisher is a member of Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
• Journal is registered in UlrichsWeb Global Serials Directory
• Journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals
• Journal is included in legitimate abstracting or indexing services or databases (such as MEDLINE, Scopus, PsycINFO, Web of Science)

Open Access refers to unrestricted online access to articles published in scholarly publications. Types of open access publications available online include articles, books and book chapters, conference papers, theses, working papers, data and images.

There are three different ways of obtaining open access to scientific research results:

Self-archive an open access version - Authors publish in the journal of their choice and archive or link to a freely available version of the manuscript in their institution's repository (for example eRepo.usiu.ac.ke), or in a national repository. A large percentage of publishers allow authors to archive a version of their article in an institutional repository.

Publish in an open access journal - Authors publish in Open Access journals that provide free and immediate access to the articles via the publishers’ web site. Authors may be required to pay an article processing charge (APC).

Pay to publish open access in a traditional journal - a large percentage of subscription journals offer an Open Access publishing option, where articles can be made immediately available via open access. Authors are required to pay an APC.

Send your data to an Open Data Repository - these repositories make data freely available for use, reuse, and redistribution.