CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: plan s journal checker tool

  • Predatory Journal Checker vs Plan S Compliance

    A Plan S compliant journal is not automatically screened by a predatory journal checker: Plan S tests open-access licensing and Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) registration, not editorial integrity or peer-review conduct. The two checks answer different questions, and treating DOAJ/Plan S clearance as proof a journal is legitimate leaves a real compliance gap that research administrators need to close separately.

    A predatory journal checker is a tool, checklist, or reference list — such as the Think. Check. Submit. checklist, Cabells’ Predatory Reports, or the archived Beall’s List — used to test whether a journal’s peer review, editorial board, and fee practices are genuine rather than a vehicle for harvesting article-processing charges.

    What is a predatory journal checker?

    A predatory journal checker evaluates the operational and editorial conduct of a journal rather than its licensing terms. It looks at whether peer review actually happens, whether the editorial board is real and contactable, whether article-processing charges are disclosed upfront, and whether the publisher’s indexing claims can be verified.

    Common red flags that these tools and checklists are built to catch include:

    • Unsolicited, aggressive email invitations promising rapid publication
    • No transparent article-processing-charge (APC) schedule until after acceptance
    • An editorial board listing academics without their knowledge or consent
    • A journal scope so broad it covers unrelated disciplines
    • Fabricated or unverifiable impact-factor and indexing claims

    These are the criteria a checker tests. None of them is what Plan S compliance actually checks — which is the source of the confusion this article addresses.

    Does Plan S compliance screen for predatory journals?

    Not directly. Plan S is a funder mandate — led by cOAlition S — requiring that publicly funded research be published open access under specific licensing terms. Its technical requirements state that a fully open-access journal must be listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), or apply for DOAJ listing within one year of publishing its first article, to count as a compliant venue.

    DOAJ listing is a proxy signal, not a predatory-publishing audit. cOAlition S guidance separately points authors toward the Think. Check. Submit. checklist for journal-selection due diligence — a clear indication that cOAlition S itself does not treat DOAJ/Plan S clearance as a substitute for a dedicated predatory check. Responsibility for the final journal-selection decision sits with the researcher and their institution, not with the funder’s compliance rule.

    DOAJ listing vs a dedicated predatory journal checker

    DOAJ vetting and a predatory journal checker overlap in intent — both aim to exclude disreputable venues — but they differ in scope, update frequency, and what they miss. DOAJ’s 2014–2016 re-application process is a useful illustration: it removed roughly 3,300 previously listed journals that failed revised inclusion criteria, which shows DOAJ listing is a snapshot assessment, not a continuously monitored guarantee.

    Mechanism What it verifies What it misses Best used for
    Plan S / DOAJ listing Open-access licence terms; baseline transparency criteria at time of listing Ongoing editorial conduct; peer-review quality after listing Confirming funder-mandate eligibility
    Predatory journal checker (Think. Check. Submit., Cabells, Beall’s archive) Editorial board authenticity, peer-review conduct, fee transparency Funder licensing compliance Author-level due diligence before submission
    Scopus / Web of Science journal check Active indexing status, citation metrics, discontinued-title flags Newer or non-English-language legitimate journals not yet indexed Cross-checking indexing claims a journal makes about itself
    Publisher/journal finder tools Journal-manuscript fit by scope and audience Legitimacy screening entirely — these tools assume the candidate pool is already vetted Narrowing a shortlist of already-verified journals

    What does a Scopus journal check add?

    A Scopus journal check confirms whether a title is actively indexed, flags titles that have been discontinued from Scopus for quality reasons, and surfaces citation-based metrics. This is a useful cross-check against a journal’s own indexing claims — predatory titles frequently claim indexing status they do not have — but Scopus coverage is not designed as a predatory-publishing screen and does not evaluate peer-review conduct directly.

    It is also asymmetric: a legitimate new journal may not yet be Scopus-indexed, so absence from Scopus is not itself proof of a predatory operation. Administrators should treat a Scopus check as one data point in a layered process, not a standalone verdict.

    How should administrators layer both checks?

    Institutions handling funder-mandate compliance and research-integrity screening as two separate workstreams should merge them into one journal-selection workflow. A practical sequence:

    1. Confirm funder eligibility first. Check DOAJ listing (or ROAD registration) to establish Plan S / open-access mandate compliance.
    2. Run a dedicated predatory check second. Apply the Think. Check. Submit. checklist, or consult Cabells’ Predatory Reports where the institution has a subscription, against the same candidate journal.
    3. Cross-check indexing claims. Verify any Scopus, Web of Science, or PubMed indexing the journal advertises against the indexing service’s own database.
    4. Escalate ambiguous cases to the institution’s research-integrity office or library scholarly-communications team rather than relying on a single automated pass/fail signal.
    5. Record the outcome in the researcher’s submission file, since funders and REF-style assessment exercises increasingly expect an audit trail of due-diligence steps, not just a final compliance flag.

    This sequencing matters because each mechanism fails differently: DOAJ/Plan S can clear a journal on licensing grounds while missing recent editorial decline; a predatory checker can flag conduct issues DOAJ has not yet caught up with; Scopus can catch a false indexing claim that neither of the other two checks is built to test.

    Common questions about predatory journal screening

    How do you check if a journal is predatory?

    Run the Think. Check. Submit. checklist against the journal, verify the editorial board members individually, confirm the article-processing charge is disclosed before submission, and cross-check any indexing claims (Scopus, DOAJ) directly against the indexing service rather than trusting the journal’s own website.

    What is a red flag for a predatory journal?

    Aggressive, unsolicited invitation emails promising unusually fast peer review are the most cited red flag. Other consistent signals include an editorial board that cannot be independently verified, a scope spanning unrelated disciplines, and article-processing fees disclosed only after acceptance.

    How do you check if a journal is reputable?

    Confirm active listing in DOAJ or an equivalent recognised index, verify the publisher belongs to COPE or a comparable ethics body, check that peer-review policy is published and specific, and confirm the editorial board’s affiliations independently rather than trusting journal-supplied contact details.

    What is considered a predatory journal?

    A predatory journal is one that charges publication fees while failing to provide the genuine editorial and peer-review services legitimate scholarly journals promise, prioritising revenue from article-processing charges over publication quality and research integrity, per definitions developed by COPE and reflected in Frandsen et al.’s peer-reviewed literature review.

    Implications and the path forward

    For institutional research offices, the practical implication is procedural: a single “is this journal Plan S compliant?” check cannot double as a research-integrity sign-off, and treating it that way creates audit risk when a funder or REF-style exercise later asks how a submission venue was verified. Layering a DOAJ/Plan S check with a dedicated predatory journal checker and an indexing cross-check is not duplicative effort — each step tests a distinct failure mode that the others do not cover.

    As open-access mandates expand and predatory operations grow more sophisticated at mimicking legitimate indexing and DOAJ-style transparency signals, the gap between funder-mandate compliance and editorial-integrity verification is likely to widen rather than close. Institutions that formalise the layered workflow now — rather than relying on DOAJ/Plan S status as an implicit predatory-publishing seal of approval — will be better positioned as funders tighten reporting expectations around journal-selection due diligence.

  • Plan S Journal Checker Tool: A Step-by-Step Compliance Guide

    What Is the Plan S Journal Checker Tool?

    The Plan S Journal Checker Tool (JCT) is a free, web-based service that lets an author check, in a single query, whether a chosen journal offers a compliant Open Access route under a specific funder’s Plan S-aligned policy. It was commissioned by cOAlition S, the international consortium of research funders behind Plan S, and built and maintained by Cottage Labs following a public tender in 2020. The tool went live for open community testing in November 2020 and has run continuously since.

    Unlike a generic journal-finder that matches a manuscript abstract to plausible venues, the JCT answers a narrower and more consequential question: given this journal, this funder and (optionally) this institution, does a compliant publishing route exist right now? That distinction matters because Plan S compliance is contractual — getting it wrong can put grant funding at risk.

    How to Use the Journal Checker Tool: A Step-by-Step Walkthrough

    The JCT’s compliance algorithm takes three inputs, only one of which is strictly required:

    • Journal (required) — identified by its ISSN; the search box also accepts journal titles and resolves them to an ISSN internally.
    • Funder (optional) — matched against a Crossref funder ID; omitting it still returns routes that do not depend on funder policy.
    • Institution (optional) — matched against a ROR (Research Organization Registry) identifier, used to surface institution-specific transformative agreements.

    In practice, the walkthrough looks like this:

    1. Go to journalcheckertool.org and enter the journal name or ISSN in the search field.
    2. Select the funder from the dropdown (only cOAlition S member funders are listed).
    3. Select the institution, or tick “No affiliation” if it does not appear or is not relevant.
    4. Run the check. The tool returns one of three outcomes for each applicable route: Compliant, Non-Compliant, or Unknown (insufficient data), each with a short audit trail explaining the decision.
    5. If more than one route is compliant, compare them — self-archiving is usually cost-free, while gold and transformative routes may carry an article processing charge (APC) or be covered by an institutional agreement.

    What happens if my funder is not listed in the Journal Checker Tool?

    If a funder does not appear in the tool’s dropdown, it is not a cOAlition S member and Plan S compliance rules do not apply to that grant. Authors should confirm current membership on cOAlition S’s published funder list before assuming no obligation exists for that award.

    What does a “Rights Retention” result mean?

    A Rights Retention result shows the funder has adopted the Plan S Rights Retention Strategy, so every journal has a compliance route: authors can self-archive the accepted manuscript under a CC BY licence, provided the mandated rights-retention statement is included in the submitted paper.

    Is the Transformative Journals route still checked by the tool?

    The tool’s TJ-Check algorithm still runs internally, but cOAlition S financial support for Transformative Journals ceased on 31 December 2024, following a January 2023 announcement that ended new applications. Authors and institutions should treat any TJ-based compliance result as historical rather than as current funding policy going forward.

    Can I check compliance without knowing my institution?

    Yes. If an institution is not listed, authors can tick the “No affiliation” checkbox and run the check on funder and journal alone, or search using the organisation’s ROR identifier, which the tool accepts directly in place of a full name match, avoiding acronym confusion.

    The Compliance Routes the JCT Checks

    The JCT’s back end runs a separate check for each of four defined routes to Plan S compliance. Not every route is available for every journal-funder-institution combination, and one route — Transformative Journals — is now effectively legacy.

    Route What it means Current status in the JCT
    Full/Gold Open Access Journal publishes all content OA immediately under a compliant licence (typically CC BY), often via an APC. Actively checked; primary route for fully OA journals listed in DOAJ.
    Self-Archiving (Green) Author deposits the accepted manuscript in a repository with no embargo, typically supported by the Rights Retention Strategy. Actively checked; available even when no other route applies, if the funder has adopted Rights Retention.
    Transformative Agreements (TA) Institution or consortium holds a “read and publish” deal, registered in the ESAC Registry, that converts subscription spend into OA publishing credits. Actively checked against the ESAC Registry; agreements are removed three months after they expire unless renewed.
    Transformative Journals (TJ) Hybrid/subscription journal previously committed to gradually increasing its OA share under a time-limited scheme. Algorithm still runs, but cOAlition S financial support and new TJ applications ended 31 December 2024.

    Where more than one route returns “Compliant,” the JCT does not rank them — it presents all valid options and leaves the choice to the author, since cost, speed and institutional agreements will differ.

    Where the Tool’s Compliance Data Comes From

    The JCT does not hold opinions of its own; it aggregates and caches data from several external, authoritative registries and refreshes them on a schedule:

    • DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) — the curated list used to identify fully Open Access journals and their licensing terms.
    • Crossref — supplies journal and funder metadata, including the Crossref Funder IDs used to match grants to policies.
    • ESAC Registry — the authoritative source for transformative agreements, including their start and expiry dates.
    • Journal Comparison Service (JCS) — a lesser-known component through which publishers voluntarily share journal-level price and service data; the list of participating publishers and covered years is published as an open CSV, even though the underlying price data itself sits behind a JCS account.
    • Shareyourpaper.org permissions data — informs self-archiving embargo and licence terms for the Green route.

    Because compliance results are only as good as the underlying registries, cOAlition S actively asks publishers to keep their DOAJ listings, ESAC agreements and JCS submissions current — an accuracy dependency that is easy to overlook when treating the JCT purely as a black-box checker.

    What This Means for Authors, Institutions and Publishers

    For authors, the practical takeaway is to run the check before submission, not after acceptance — a journal that looked compliant a year ago may have lost an expired transformative agreement, and a TJ-based result from 2024 no longer reflects live funder policy. The tool’s open, documented API (github.com/CottageLabs/jct) also means library systems, submission platforms and reference managers can embed live compliance checks rather than linking out.

    For research administration teams, the JCT’s audit trail is the useful artefact: it gives a defensible, timestamped record of why a route was judged compliant, which is valuable when reporting to funders or resolving a post-publication dispute.

    For publishers, the tool is a reminder that Plan S compliance is now infrastructure-dependent: a journal’s real-world eligibility rests on whether its DOAJ entry, ESAC agreement and JCS submission are current, not on the publisher’s own marketing claims of “Plan S compliant” status.

    The Outlook: JCT After the Plan S Review

    cOAlition S ran a formal review of Plan S’s requirements, effects and impact through 2024, alongside the scheduled wind-down of Transformative Agreement and Transformative Journal financial support at year end. That review is reshaping which routes funders will continue to recognise, and the JCT’s route-by-route architecture means it can retire or add compliance checks — as it did with TJ — without authors needing to learn a new interface. The practical implication is that the Journal Checker Tool, not any single funder policy page, remains the fastest way to get a current answer, and it is worth re-checking a journal even if it was confirmed compliant in a previous grant cycle.