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I would like to find journals that:

  • are ranked with JCR (no matter how low) and
  • have open access (anyone can access the papers for free) and
  • are free to publish (authors are not required to pay)

Maybe I am asking for a unicorn, but I think this should be feasible. If I'm not mistaken, arxiv.org only fails in the first point. If someone could provide (a link to) a list of such a kind of journals that would be awesome. If such a list does not exist, how would I go about creating a list.

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  • 8
    Journal of Machine Learning Research is perhaps the most successful example in computer science. Stuart Schieber's description of the journal's internal structure is amazing. (On the other hand, arxiv.org fails because it's not a journal; arXiv papers are not peer-reviewed.)
    – JeffE
    Jul 30 '13 at 18:06
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    There are very, very, very, very many journals out there. I think the question would be improved if you specifically limited it to a field (rather than I prefer, specify what you need).
    – gerrit
    Jul 30 '13 at 18:10
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    The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics also fits your criteria.
    – Kallus
    Jul 30 '13 at 18:17
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    Do you care about JCR specifically, or are other indexing services like Scopus acceptable?
    – JeffE
    Jul 30 '13 at 20:37
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    arXiv.org also failed because it is a repository, not a journal.
    – Philip Gibbs
    Feb 20 '14 at 0:08
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Please feel free to edit anything.

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  • I removed TSWJ since it is published by Hinadwi which Beall considers to be a borderline predatory publisher and it has an APC
    – StrongBad
    Aug 1 '13 at 16:04
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    I am down voting because I think that this type of list goes against the types of answers that are best suited for the SE network. It is going to be an hugely incomplete and maintainable list.
    – StrongBad
    Aug 1 '13 at 16:34
  • @DanielE.Shub There are longer and more dynamic lists on wikipedia. Sure this is a hell lot of work for a single person, but not for a community, IMHO. If SE cannot handle this, then where? I'm not sure about how well will wikipedia work for this, but I guess I'll try in a week or so if this question remains closed.
    – Trylks
    Aug 1 '13 at 16:48
  • part of the SE philosophy is that just because something doesn't fit someplace else doesn't mean it fits here. I would guess that there are 1000s of journals that meet the requirements. This answer is not going to provide an efficient way of accessing the information.
    – StrongBad
    Aug 1 '13 at 16:58
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    @DanielE.Shub there are 11K journals in JCR, out of those most do not provide OA, out of those with OA most charge authors (for publishing, processing, etc.) It's already surprising that there is any journal with these characteristics, I guesstimate the list cannot have more than one hundred journals by any means. But I can agree such a list may not be the best solution. I'll try to think about something else.
    – Trylks
    Aug 1 '13 at 17:12
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This is perhaps not exactly what you look for but, as a partial answer, the Advanced Search feature of the directory of open access journals (DOAJ) lets you filter the open access journals by subject AND by publication fee. Unfortunately, you cannot infer from the DOAJ data whether these journals are on JCR.

In particular, the DOAJ search results for open access journals in Computer Science with zero publication charges are at this URL.

In principle, as a next step one could compare (by hand or perhaps using some software) the list resulting from the DOAJ search with the list from JCR for (a given branch of) computer science or search in JCR (e.g. in the list of full journal titles) for specific journal names.

Also, the DOAJ listing includes links to home pages of journals and often data about the journal impact factor (if any) or JCR listing are available at these home pages.

To give a specific example resulting from a quick attempt to compare the lists, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research is open access with zero publication charges and has a 2013 IF of 0.904.

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There are many journals that satisfy your criteria… here's how to find them!

  1. Use Journal Citation Reports

  2. Search journals by publisher: enter image description here

  3. Choose an open access publisher, such as “Public Library of Science” enter image description here

  4. Enjoy! enter image description here

Edit: as JeffE wisely noted, this does not address the criterion of “no publishing charge”. You'll have to check the various journals, but some have no publishing charges, including some published by Hindawi Publishing Corporation for example. To find out which, cross-reference the JCR data with this list maintained by Berkeley.

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    This does not address his third criterion: free to publish. Many (most?) open access publishers require authors to pay significant publication fees, including PLOS.
    – JeffE
    Jul 30 '13 at 20:04
  • Another pitfall is that some open-access journal can be published by publishers that also publish traditional journals, i.e. are not "open-access publisher". An example would be Forum of Mathematics, published by Cambridge University press (but this one plans to charge APC soon).
    – Benoît Kloeckner
    Sep 26 '14 at 12:24
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Sherpa Romeo, http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/, might be helpful to you, as well. I think you'd still have to do your cross-check against the JCR, though.

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