Related Initiatives

On this page you can find several related initiatives aiming to document journals’ editorial policies or to contribute to responsible editorial management.

Multiple assessment criteria

Several efforts have recently been undertaken with the aim to responsibly evaluate scholarly publishing outlets and to displace the dominance of impact factors in the assessment of research. Key in this endeavor is that journals are assessed on a plurality of features. The importance of a multidimensional perspective on journal assessment is for instance emphasized in this commentary co-authored by researchers from CWTS.

PREP contributes to responsible approaches to journal assessment by allowing journals to be evaluated based on their editorial procedures. However, to properly assess journal quality, other features could be considered, including open access status and policy, preprinting policies and user experience with the editorial process. Several other platforms present data on these features, including:

• Transpose database
  A database of journal policies on peer review, co-reviewing, and preprinting
• Quality Open Access Market (QOAM)
  A database providing information on journals’ open access possibilities, including open access fees and author evaluations.
• SciRev
  A database consisting of authors’ experiences with journal peer review, including duration of and satisfaction with the review process.
• SHERPA RoMEO
  An online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis.
• TOP Factor
  A database evaluating journals on the extent to which their policies align with the TOP Guidelines on transparency and openness.
• DOAJ
  A community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to open access, peer-reviewed journals.
• Latindex
  A Latin American platform assisting journal editors to responsibly organise their journals. In addition, it holds a directory and catalogue of scholarly journals, providing various kinds of journal level information as well as assessing them based on a set of quality criteria.

If you are working on any other initiative on peer review, editorial procedures or journal policies that could be listed on this page, please contact us.