New free tool to aid journal selection!

With new open access journals entering the publication space every day, all with highly varied article-processing charges, how do you determine whether you’re really selecting the best possible journal for the price you’re paying? A new free online interactive tool, called “Cost Effectiveness for Open Access Journals” is here to help you do just this.

The open access model is definitely gaining popularity and many authors are willing to pay the necessary fees to ensure that their work is available to readers as soon as it is published. Unfortunately though, this scenario has also given rise to many bogus or predatory publishers, whose journals often charge exorbitant author fees but lack quality and credibility. I had written a post about these bogus publishers a couple of weeks ago.

The tool, Cost Effectiveness, aims to help authors compare the cost-effectiveness of different open access journals and select the most suitable journal for their work. The tool plots the article influence of a journal against its publishing fees. The article influence is calculated based on the number of citations articles in that particular journal have received, while also considering the source of the citations.

This tool will help authors choose between two journals with similar publishing fees and can even be useful for identifying bogus publishers.

Here’s how the tool works:

Step 1: Select a field of study from the drop-down list:

Step 2: Center the cross-hairs on the journal you are interested in. All points in the upper left quadrant represent journals that are more cost-effective than the journal you’ve picked. 

Journals to the far right and bottom of the graph can be considered the most cost-ineffective because they have the lowest prestige.

Go ahead and try it!