Evaluating Open Access Journals: Moving from Provocative to Practical in Characterizing Journal Practices

In today’s scholarly publishing ecosystem, researchers, librarians, academic institutions, funders, and even publishers have difficulty in identifying and tracking journals that engage in practices ranging from fraudulent and deceptive to questionable and unethical. 

In this course, we will define these specious practices, avoiding the binary “predatory” and “legitimate” classification by exploring the nuances of journal practices and how these practices developed as unintended consequences of the current academic publishing model. We will investigate tools for evaluating journal quality and discuss relevant case studies that will provide helpful context. Finally, we will review recommendations for raising awareness and promoting good practices in scholarly communications. 

This course aims to prepare librarians and other support personnel to offer training and support for researchers in how to understand the norms in open access publishing and how to avoid deceptive or low-quality journals. We will cover useful tools for mitigating the likelihood of publishing in these journals and discuss steps to take to assist researchers who believe they may have published in such a journal.