After giving the task of choosing the “right” journal for a manuscript to a student, I started to think a bit more about the nature of science publishing. A lot has been written and discussed about predatory publishers/journals and publishers taking advantage of their power over Universities. So, I wanted a list of “good” journals as an initial starting point and guide for students?
I initially thought of two criteria that can be applied to narrow the field of journals rather quickly:
- First, publishers that are non-profit or from a society or University press seem to be worth supporting.
- In addition, an Open Access option should at least be available, as I believe we should try to make our research available to as many people as possible.
Of note, I left out cost/publication charges/fees as a criteria on purpose. However, some journals on list list seem to really overcharge in general and in particular for making an article Open Access.
So, I set out to collect journals that fulfill the above criteria and thus, in my view, seem to be “good guys”. For now, I only included journals that seem to be relevant to my field of research, e.g. bioinformatics, computational biology, immunoinformatics, molecular biology, etc. Where relevant, I included more information, e.g. on open access, scope, criteria, and impact. Where available, I included journal metrics from SCImago. However, SCImago is based on on Scopus data, which is owned by Elsevier. If anyone can point me to something similar but more open I would happily include/replace it.
In any case, there are many more journals, I believe, that could be on the list. If you want to contribute please sent me a pull request on github.
Disclaimer: This list is non-comprehensive, work in progress, and I do not endorse per se any of the journals mentioned explicitly. You should investigate on your own if you agree with the editorial policies of individual journals. I am also not implying that you should only publish in the journals on this list (neither am I). I also do not condemn any journal not mentioned, neither do I imply that they are not “good guys”. Make up your own mind what is important to you.