Sources and resources
Standards for evaluating journals and publishers
- Think. Check. Submit. offers guidelines not just for journals, but also for books and book chapters. Similar guidance is available for conferences.
- DOAJ's Publishing best practice and standards for inclusion.
- Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, jointly published by OASPA, COPE, DOAJ and WAME. Reputable open access publishers are often members of one or more of these organizations.
- Ulrich's Periodicals Directory provides detailed information about periodicals of all types, including information about peer review and abstracting and indexing.
Selected articles on ethical/unethical publishing issues
- The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) discussion paper, Predatory publishing, provides more in depth information on the practices of unethical publishers and the impacts on scholarly publishing.
- What value do journal whitelists and blacklists have in academia? (da Silva and Tsigaris, 2018) This article takes a deep dive into the issues with lists.
- Open access, power and privilege (Swauger, 2017). This essay calls attention to unquestioned power and privilege in publishing, and some of the problems with establishing lists of unethical publishers.
- There is no black and white definition of predatory publishing (Siler, 2020) describes some of the ambiguity in defining predatory publishing.
A note on terminology: We do not condone the use of racist terms and phrases such as "whitelist" or "blacklist," and do not use such terms ourselves.