How to choose a journal—or how to avoid being scammed

How to choose a journal—or how to avoid being scammed

Your publications are your product. The idea is that once they are published, the information will be available forever. The ease of access changes with whether they are open access or not, but either way there are methods for everyone to get a copy.

Life was pretty easy in terms of choosing a journal before the internet. Not as many choices.

But now. Sheesh. Everyone and their neighbor is trying to publish a science journal. Why…because they can make megabucks!

The number of new journals that show up advertising in my inbox is staggering. As a result, I have a specific list of criteria that the journal has to meet before I send in a paper.

1) pubmed listed (ok, we made a mistake once but if anyone wants a copy let me know)

I might consider breaking this rule if it is a new journal published by someone I know who has a good reason for starting a new journal.

2) linked to a society. This is a great way of filtering out the chaff but you still have to see if the society has been around. In your field, you will know which ones are solid.

3) published by a major publishing house that has been around for a long time.

4) have already published many articles in the field of the paper you are submitting. Look in your reference list. What journal did you cite the most?

This will eliminate the scammers and they are pretty simple rules to follow.

But, open access or not?

PLoS biology and PLoS medicine cost $2900 per article. Enough said. If I publish 5 papers open access a year, that’s about $15,000. That just isn’t happening. It is ½ of my NSERC grant. Are you kidding! Every author who wants to publish open access struggles with this problem.

On the plus side, some universities have open access publication support. Good luck. I would like to publish everything in open access but I can’t due to cost. Our university just announced that the publication support is available if you don’t have a grant. So that eliminates me. They also won’t support partial open access where the paper could be published without cost.

The benefit of the wildcat open access journals, as I’m sure you’ve seen in the news, is that it is easier to publish there. This is not the case for respectable journals. OK, there may be mistakes due to reviewer overload or a poor editor, but on the whole the papers that get published are better than the ones submitted because of the feedback by good reviewers. I’m sure everyone has horror stories of reviewers but it’s better to publish in a respected journal (not necessarily high impact factor) than a journal that doesn’t care about the quality. Go for quality.

There are a few reasons why.

1) open access is currently all online. Who supports the website? If the journal goes under or decides not to support the site then your paper is gone…GONE.. FOREVER. At least with paper copies one could always find a library with the article. So from a longevity perspective, open access/online is more risky than paper.

2) most of the open access online journals are scams. They want to publish because they want to make megabucks.  Use my criteria above.

I realize that even good publishing houses are making a lot on these online/open access publications. We as a scientific group need to start pushing back more. 

Good luck, go with respected journals.