Identifying legitimate open access journals: some suggestions from a publisher

Key points • New publishing models lead to new players – not all of them good. • No commonly accepted criteria aid scholars to select 'good' journals. • Journals (and publishers) need to assert their good practice. • How do publishers serve their different customers – readers, authors, reviewers, and the public? The scholarly publishing market has been disrupted by several recent innovations, amongst which has been open access (OA) publishing. OA publishing is rapidly growing in popularity amongst authors and readers, and in keeping with trends seen in other rapidly developing markets, a fl ood of new players of varying quality has recently entered the industry. It seems certain that as the industry consolidates many of these players will drop out or merge with their larger competitors, but in the meantime scholars are faced with the challenge of having to identify and avoid low-quality publishers. Unfortunately no commonly accepted set of criteria has yet arisen to aid scholars. One prominent set of criteria has been devised by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall, 1 but as noted by Mehrpour and Khajavi, 2 Beall's criteria are somewhat problematic in the sense that any reactive blacklist inherently fails to provide a comprehensive response to the problem. Other responses include crowd-sourced ratings websites reliant on users to provide reviews of individual journals such as JournalGuide. 3 However these websites are reliant on assessments by small, self-selected groups of reviewers so ratings may not originate from representative cross-sections of scholars. These websites are also reliant on scholars being aware of their availability. Various sets of criteria intended to allow scholars to assess unfamiliar journals have also been put forward. Use of such criteria allow scholars to make informed objective assessments without the drawbacks of the other methods described above. However, criteria must fi rst be identifi ed and then communicated to scholars. In this brief article I present my views on what criteria could be used. My opinions on this topic have come about through having worked in open access scholarly publishing for more than 10 years, correspondence with opinion-makers in the fi eld, and several © Tom Hill 2015 Tom Hill