Faculty of Humanities

There are many measures of quality to assist you in determining the legitimacy of a publisher or journal. Resources like DOAJ, SHERPA/RoMEO and recently ThinkCheckSubmit are all credible initiatives to use alongside certain indicators to evaluate publications:

• Is the journal's mission and scope clearly defined?
• Are there spelling and grammar errors on the website, in titles and abstracts?
• Is there an editorial team you can contact? Or are the email addresses non-professional and non-journal/publisher affiliated?
• Is there a submission fee instead of a publication fee?
• Does the journal charge excessive fees for publication? It should be clear what fees are paid for. Predatory publishers hide fees until after you submit your manuscript.
• Does the publication claim to have an impact factor when there is none?
• Are there clear production, peer-review and publication processes?

These are some of the questions to ask when you decide on where to publish. For more assistance, you can ask your librarian. You can also visit specialist in copyright and scholarly communications, Denise Nicholson's tips on Scholarly Horizons.

Here is a handy graphic with tips on how to identify predatory journals:

DOAJ provides a list of trusted, open access scholarly journals (11 544) from across the world, and from different disciplines. Journal Editors are encouraged to submit their journals for evaluation, and researchers and librarians are encouraged to use this list as a valuable resource to identify journals to publish with, but also to find information from to advance further research.

It is easy to see exactly which journals are from which country, from which discipline, at any time, by downloading it in Excel from the following:

https://doaj.org/csv (the file is updated every 30 minutes)

Use the functions in Excel to sort data/clean as you wish, and more. OpenRefine also an option to clean/manipulate data.

Please encourage scholarly publication journals – especially from Africa – to consider applying for evaluation and inclusion.

The Directory of Open Access Journals was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden, with 300 open access journals and today contains ca. 10000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.

DOAJ is a membership organisation and membership is available in 3 main categories: Publisher, Ordinary Member and Sponsor. A DOAJ Membership is a clear statement of intent and proves a commitment to quality, peer-reviewed open access. DOAJ is co-author to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (Principles) and DOAJ members are expected to follow these principles as a condition of membership. DOAJ reserves the right to reject applications for membership, or revoke membership if a member or sponsor is found to contravene the Principles. Read more about membership here.