User:Slawekb/Open access

Some scholarly journals claim to provide peer review, but in fact provide none. For the purposes of determining the reliability of a source, saying "but it's a journal" is as inconsequential as saying "but it's a newspaper": reputation matters in academic publishing as much as it does in any other type of publishing. Many of the more questionable scholarly publishing outfits are (predatory) open access journals. Open access publishing is a relatively new concept, and most open access publishers are relatively new outfits. Some of these may be legitimate, but the majority are not. Unless an open access journal independently has a reputation for publishing scholarly work of a high quality, papers published in it should be considered effectively as self-published sources for the purposes of determining their reliability on Wikipedia.

Some other good indicators of an unreliable scholarly journal include:
 * A dearth of library holdings. Even though they are freely available online, open access publishers with a good reputation will generally be indexed by many libraries.  WorldCat is a catalog that searches library holdings.
 * Questionable journals are often not indexed by other kinds of aggregating services, like SCImago (at ).
 * Impossibly high impact factors. The impact factor of journals are listed in Journal Citation Reports.  If a journal boasts a high impact factor, but is not listed there, then the claimed impact factor is questionable.