Criteria for journals that don’t suck™

The scientific publication system is fucked up. I have written up my reasons for why I believe this here.

One of the actions every researcher can take to do something about it, is to stop contributing to journals that suck. Even better, start contributing to journals that don’t suck™¹.

Think of it as a white list approach to publishing. Formulate some criteria for inclusion and then start gathering the journals that meet them in your field².

These are my own criteria for journals that don’t suck™.

Jointly necessary:³

not owned or operated by Big Publishing (Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Springer Nature)
Open Access

Individually sufficient, if jointly necessary conditions are met⁴

non-profit
scholar-run/ community-run
Diamond Open Access⁵

I have kept the criteria quite simple, but they actually narrow down the list of possible publication outlets in the field I do research a lot. Up until now, I have not encountered too many edge cases, but I am sure I will and will have to update the criteria at some point. We’ll see.

One element to mention is that the criteria allow journals to be operated by for-profit entities. I’ve chosen to do so because I generally do not have a problem with a company offering publishing services at reasonable rates. The problem with Big Publishing is not that Elsevier/RELX et al. are companies. It’s that they exploit a quasi-monopolistic position in the market of selling prestige points to generate excessive profits.

Also, these criteria allow the inclusion of journals run by quite big entities like Cambridge University Press, which are non-profits, but operate to generate money for big, often already rich universities (like Cambridge). These publishers sometimes do not feel that far removed from Big Publishing, especially as they are under pressure to increase profit margins. But still, where profits go seems still a world away from e.g. where RELX profits go.

I am pretty confident these criteria also exclude scammy publishing companies like MDPI, without having to single them out specifically.

Where to find them

Here are some good overall starting places to curate your own list for your own field (just starting places!):

And also, I really think we should all start sharing our own lists (I will share mine next, now I first have to get some coffee).

I’ve also got some good input from people on Mastodon, based on replies to this post:

Post by @mario_angst_sci@fediscience.org

View on Mastodon

Footnotes

Hey, I’ve obviously not trade-marked the term for real↩︎
In my opinion, such an approach is much more productive than having black lists. For example, there used to be a famous list of predatory journals, with never-ending drama and even legal action surrounding it. And given the nature of the current scientific publishing system, new journals that suck crop up all the time, much more frequent than cool new initiatives, so having a black list is a bit like playing whack-a-mole.↩︎
all of these must be met↩︎
one of these suffices, as long as the first conditions are all met↩︎
free to publish and read ↩︎