EIFL has compiled a new guide, Choosing a Journal for Your Research: Checklist for Researchers and Librarians. The guide includes a comprehensive checklist for evaluating the key elements of a journal and its website and is designed to help researchers to choose the most appropriate journal for their work. The guide can also be used by research librarians to guide researchers through the process of selecting a journal.

The concept for the guide emerged from EIFL’s monthly meet-ups of Open Science trainers. It was developed by Milica Ševkušić, EIFL Open Access Programme Project Coordinator, and is based on her practical research support activities, training sessions, and discussions with researchers and librarians.

In addition to helping researchers with journal selection, the EIFL guide can be used by librarians for scenario-based training, in which researchers can practise analyzing journals.  Trainers can use the EIFL guide in combination with other guides and tools. For example a trainer can use the Think. Check. Submit tool for checking a journal, and then also use EIFL’s guide for more detailed checking. If the trainer uses the cOAlition S Journal Checker Tool to find a journal that meets the Plan S requirements, EIFL’s guide can be used to analyse the journal’s quality. 

We would like to acknowledge the inspiration provided by the Diamond OA Standard (DOAS), developed by the Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication (DIAMAS) project, and the checklist Think. Check. Submit.

We appreciate the input and feedback from researchers and librarians who contributed to the development of this guide.

The guide is available for download as a PDF and can be viewed online.