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Choosing a Journal

Strategies and tools for investigating and evaluating your options

Journal Categories

Society or Association journals are owned, sponsored, or otherwise associated with learned and professional societies (e.g., JAMA and APA).

Mega journals are open access journals designed to be much larger than traditional journals by exercising low selectivity among accepted articles and provide broad readership (e.g., PLOS One and BMJ Open).

Subscription-based journals generally charge libraries or readers a fee to access content (any non-open access journal).

Open access journals are free to read but may charge authors a publication fee (also called an article processing fee).

Hybrid journals are subscription-based journals that have select freely-available articles if the author pay an open access fee.