OASPA Membership Criteria Explained

OASPA — the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association — is a trade association of open-access publishers, not a journal directory or a vetting checklist. It is easy to confuse with tools covered in CASRAI’s DOAJ vs. Beall’s List vs. Think.Check.Submit comparison, because it appears throughout that landscape as a co-author of shared standards. But OASPA itself does a structurally different job: it is a membership body that publishers themselves join, evaluated against OASPA’s own Membership Criteria and bound by its Code of Conduct — not a list a researcher searches to check a journal, and not a checklist an author works through unassisted.

What OASPA actually is

OASPA was launched on 14 October 2008 as a non-profit trade association representing open-access publishers globally, across all disciplines and publisher sizes. It was originally announced as the “Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association” and is now generally referred to as the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association — both forms describe the same organization and the OASPA acronym. Its members are publishing organizations — commercial and society publishers, university presses, academic/research libraries that publish, and individual “scholar publishers” running a single journal — rather than individual researchers or journals in isolation.

This distinguishes OASPA from every tool in CASRAI’s existing DOAJ/Beall’s List/Think.Check.Submit comparison: DOAJ is a curated directory a journal applies to be listed in; Beall’s List was a one-person, now-discontinued blacklist; Think.Check.Submit is a free self-assessment checklist an author works through alone. OASPA is none of these — it is closer in kind to a professional/trade body, comparable structurally to how COPE functions for editorial ethics, except OASPA’s remit is specifically publisher-level open-access practice.

Membership criteria: what a publisher has to demonstrate

Publishers are not simply invited to join. Applicants are evaluated against OASPA’s published Membership Criteria, and admission is not automatic or permanent — a publisher agrees to abide by the Code of Conduct as a condition of membership and can be expected to demonstrate ongoing compliance. Based on OASPA’s own published criteria and Code of Conduct, the areas an applicant is assessed against include:

Peer review. Journals must describe genuine, independent external review by subject-matter experts who are not part of the publisher’s own editorial staff.
Editorial board or governing body. A journal needs a named editorial board or equivalent governing body of recognized experts in its subject scope — not an anonymous or nominal one.
Business model and fee transparency. Revenue sources, including article processing charges (APCs) and any other publishing fees, must be clearly and publicly disclosed, including how those fees relate to any licensing options offered.
Copyright and licensing. OASPA members are expected to use Creative Commons or comparably open licensing, with any pricing differences tied to license choice disclosed transparently.
Archiving and preservation. A clear plan for long-term digital preservation of published content (for example, deposit with CLOCKSS or PubMed Central) must be indicated, so that content remains accessible even if a journal or publisher ceases operating.
Marketing conduct. Direct marketing activity — including manuscript solicitation emails — must comply with the Code of Conduct’s standards, a direct response to the aggressive solicitation practices associated with predatory publishing.

These categories overlap substantially — deliberately — with DOAJ’s own inclusion criteria and with Think.Check.Submit’s checklist questions, because all three trace back to the same shared framework: the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, a document jointly authored and maintained by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA, and WAME (the World Association of Medical Editors). OASPA’s Membership Criteria are effectively that shared framework applied specifically at publisher-membership level, rather than at the level of an individual journal listing.

Membership categories

OASPA membership is structured by organization type and scale rather than being a single undifferentiated tier. Publisher members are grouped by size (OASPA describes categories running from small through very large professional publishing organizations), with separate membership classes for academic/research libraries that publish, university presses, and individual “scholar publishers” — researchers or small groups publishing a single journal in their field. This size- and type-based structure is part of why OASPA membership numbers and dues differ meaningfully from a small society journal to a large commercial open-access publisher, and it is worth checking a specific publisher’s actual category rather than assuming “OASPA member” describes one uniform arrangement.

What OASPA membership does and doesn’t tell you

For a research administrator evaluating an unfamiliar open-access publisher or journal, OASPA membership is a genuinely useful signal, but it answers a narrower question than researchers sometimes assume:

It tells you the publisher applied for and was evaluated against a defined set of practice standards, and agreed to a Code of Conduct that OASPA can act on if violated (OASPA maintains a process for complaints against members).
It does not tell you that every individual journal from that publisher is high quality. Membership is evaluated at the publisher/organization level; editorial quality, rejection rates, and subject-matter rigor still vary journal to journal within a member publisher’s portfolio, the same way DOAJ indexing operates journal-by-journal rather than certifying an entire publisher.
It is not the same evidence as DOAJ indexing. A journal can be DOAJ-listed without its publisher being an OASPA member, and a publisher can be an OASPA member with some journals not (yet) indexed in DOAJ. Checking both, where relevant, gives a fuller picture than either alone — see CASRAI’s DOAJ vs. Beall’s List vs. Think.Check.Submit comparison for how those two tools differ from each other.
It is one input into the broader predatory-publisher question, not a complete answer on its own. CASRAI’s full workflow guide, How to Identify Predatory Journals and Publishers, covers the wider set of red flags and verification steps beyond any single membership or listing check.

How to check whether a publisher is an OASPA member

OASPA publishes its current member list on its own site (oaspa.org), organized by membership category. Because membership can lapse or be revoked for Code of Conduct violations, and new publishers are admitted on an ongoing basis, the authoritative check is always OASPA’s own current list rather than a publisher’s self-description or a badge displayed on a journal’s website — the same caution CASRAI’s predatory-journal guide applies to unverifiable “indexed in” or “member of” claims generally.

Frequently asked questions

Is OASPA the same organization as DOAJ?

No. DOAJ (the Directory of Open Access Journals) is a curated index that individual journals apply to be listed in. OASPA is a trade association that publishing organizations join. The two are separate organizations that co-author shared standards (the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, alongside COPE and WAME) but run entirely separate application and evaluation processes.

Does OASPA membership mean a journal is peer reviewed to a high standard?

It means the publisher was evaluated against criteria that include a requirement for genuine independent peer review, and agreed to a Code of Conduct covering editorial practice. It is not a per-journal quality certification or ranking, and editorial rigor still varies across a member publisher’s individual journals.

Can OASPA membership be revoked?

OASPA’s Code of Conduct is a condition of continued membership, and OASPA maintains a process for handling complaints against members, so membership is not necessarily permanent once granted. Always check OASPA’s current published member list rather than relying on a publisher’s own claim of membership.

How is OASPA different from Think.Check.Submit?

Think.Check.Submit is a free self-assessment checklist an author works through to evaluate one specific journal before submitting — it issues no verdict and maintains no member list. OASPA is a membership organization with its own evaluation process, criteria, and Code of Conduct that publishers apply to join. OASPA is, however, one of the coalition members behind Think.Check.Submit’s own checklist.

OASPA: The Membership Criteria and Standards Behind the Open-Access Publishers’ Association