Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Open access chemistry publishing options in 2018

I just noticed that my go-to journal increased its APC again.* Now there's a flat fee of $1095 so I am re-evaluating my options for impact neutral OA publishing. I don't think PeerJ is greedy, so I think the most likely explanation is be that their old model was not sustainable. I now feel I have been a bit to hard on some other OA publishers (e.g. here and here, but not here).

While price and impact-neutrality is the main consideration, open peer review is a nice bonus that I became accustomed to from PeerJ. In my experience it makes for much better reviews and keeps the tone civil.

Impact neutral journals
$750 ACS Omega (+ ACS membership $166/year). Closed peer review. WARNING: not real OA. You still sign away your copyright to the ACS.

$1000 F1000Research. Open peer review. Bio-related

$1095 PeerJ. Open peer review. Bio-related. PeerJ also has a membership model, which may be cheaper than the APC.

(The RSC manages "the journal’s chemistry section by commissioning articles and overseeing the peer-review process")

$1350 Cogent Chemistry. Has a "pay what you can" policy. Closed peer review.

$1495 PLoS ONE. Closed peer review.

$1760 Scientific Reports. Closed peer review



Free or reasonably priced journals that judge perceived impact
$0 Chemical Science Closed peer review

$0 Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry. Closed peer review.

$0 Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology. Closed peer review.

$0 ACS Central Science. Closed peer review. ($500-1000 for CC-BY, WARNING: not real OA. You still sign away your copyright to the ACS as far as I know) 

$100 Living Journal of Computational Molecular Science. Closed peer review

€500 Chemistry2. Closed peer review.

£500 RSC Advances. Closed peer review. (Normally £750)


Let me know if I have missed anything.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

No comments: