Criteria for journals that don’t suck – Mario Angst

"These are my own criteria for journals that don’t suck™.

Jointly necessary:3

• not owned or operated by Big Publishing (Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Springer Nature)
• Open Access

Individually sufficient, if jointly necessary conditions are met4

• non-profit
• scholar-run/ community-run
• Diamond Open Access5

I have kept the criteria quite simple, but they actually narrow down the list of possible publication outlets in the field I do research a lot. Up until now, I have not encountered too many edge cases, but I am sure I will and will have to update the criteria at some point. We’ll see.

One element to mention is that the criteria allow journals to be operated by for-profit entities. I’ve chosen to do so because I generally do not have a problem with a company offering publishing services at reasonable rates. The problem with Big Publishing is not that Elsevier/RELX et al. are companies. It’s that they exploit a quasi-monopolistic position in the market of selling prestige points to generate excessive profits...."