Library Class and Subject Guides: Intro to Honors: Open Access Journal Activity: Home

Concepts

Source Credibility: Hilligoss and Rieh (2008) identified five concepts people use when assessing source credibility: truthfulness, believability, trustworthiness, objectivity, and reliability.

Open Access: Suber (2012) defines Open Access as "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions". If you want to learn more about the case for Open Access, watch this video (8 min)

This activity was adapted from a project by John P. Madden at St. Cloud State University.

Journals to Review

Tools that could contribute to your evaluation

MavScholar
This is a broad search tool where you can search for specific article titles.

Education Source This link opens in a new window
This is an index to education research literature. It provides a fairly comprehensive list of article information published in the field of education.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Use Google Scholar to see how often research in these journals were cited by other scholars.
Ulrich's Periodical Directory This link opens in a new window
Ulrich's "is an easy to search source of detailed information on more than 300,000 periodicals (also called serials) of all types"

Directory of Open Access Journals
"DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals"
Scimago Journal Rankings
The SCImago Journal Rank is a publicly available portal that includes the journal indicators that can be used to assess and analyze scientific domains. Journals can be grouped by subject area (27 major thematic areas), subject category (309 specific subject categories) or by country. Citation data is drawn from over 34,100 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers and country performance metrics from 239 countries worldwide.

Background video for OA Journal Activity

Background Video for OA Activity
Video discusses source credibility, traditional academic journal publishing, and Open Access as a publishing alternative.

Sources for Evaluating these OA Journals

8 Ways to Identify a Questionable Open Access Journal
This brief web article provides tips on identifying suspect OA research journals.
Boston College University Libraries Assessing Journal Quality: OA Journals Quality Indicators
This page provides quick indicators of quality for assessing Open Access journals. The Boston College Libraries' page was adapted from Grand Valley State University Libraries.
The Good and the Bad of Open Access Journals.
Huffington Post blog entry by A. Townsend Peterson a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas.