Journal Quality and Author's Rights

Assessing Journal Quality

Cabells Scholarly Analytics Provides a variety of journal metrics, including impact factor, altmetrics (online mentions), review time, acceptance rate, etc. Includes a feature for side-by-side journal comparisons.
InCites™ Journal Citation Reports® (Users must create an account for initial login) Find a variety of metrics for journal quality, including impact factor, immediacy index, Eigenfactor score, and article influence score. Searchable by journal name and browsable by research category.
SCImago Journal & Country Rank Access journal rankings based on citation data from the Scopus database. Journals can be grouped by major thematic areas and specific subject categories.
Scopus
In search results, click on the journal title to view journal metrics. Scopus will give you SJR (SCImago Journal Rank), IPP (Impact per Publication), and SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) measurements.
Web of Science In search results, click on the journal title to view journal metrics. In Web of Science, you will view its IF (Impact Factor) and JCR (Journal Citation Reports) rankings.
The Directory of Open Access Journals The DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

Selecting a Journal

Manuscript Matching Tools

Empower yourself by using:

Think, Check, Submit Checklist to identify trusted journals and publishers
Think, Check, Attend Site and Conference Checker to judge the legitimacy of a conference

Unsure of your rights as an author?

SHERPA/RoMEO will guide you through your rights to archive various versions of your research.

Researchers often publish in journals that may ask for complete transfer of the author’s copyright to the journal. Many researchers might not know they have more rights than they think: as the author of a work you are the copyright holder unless and until you transfer the copyright to someone else in a signed agreement.

Assigning your rights matters. Normally, the copyright holder possesses the exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, public performance, public display, and modification of the original work. An author who has transferred copyright without retaining these rights must ask permission unless the use is one of the statutory exemptions in copyright law.
The copyright holder controls the work. Decisions concerning use of the work, such as distribution, access, pricing, updates, and any use restrictions belong to the copyright holder. Authors who have transferred their copyright without retaining any rights may not be able to place the work on course websites, copy it for students or colleagues, deposit the work in a public online archive, or reuse portions in a subsequent work. That’s why it is important to retain the rights you need.
Transferring copyright doesn’t have to be all or nothing. The law allows you to transfer copyright while holding back rights for yourself and others. This is the compromise that the SPARC Author Addendum helps you to achieve.

_{Adapted from SPARC’s “Author Rights: Using the SPARC Author Addendum,” licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.}

The SPARC Author Addendum

This is a legal instrument that you can use to modify your copyright transfer agreements with non-open access journal publishers. It allows you to select which individual rights out of the bundle of copyrights you want to keep, such as

Distributing copies in teaching and research
Posting the article on a personal or institutional website
Creating derivative works

Authors Alliance Resources

The Authors Alliance also provides several rights reversion resources designed to help authors take back control copyrights and make works newly available in the ways authors want.

Understanding and Negotiating Publication Contracts
Negotiation sucess stories for author-friendly publication contract terms
A model author-publisher contract (digital scholarship)

Last updated on Aug 12, 2020