WikiJournal User Group/Comparison to other journals

Throughout history, scholarly journals have been published. Subscription has been required for access to copyrighted journals. Alternatively, an article can be purchased, one must be an enrolled college or university student to access an article, or a user can search for free open-access journals, which have existed long before WikiJournal. Publishers of open-access journals have required charges for authors to publish their own works. Like many subscription-based journals, the peer review processes for most of those journals have been nontransparent. Publishing articles into WikiJournal, on the contrary, requires no charge. Moreover, at WikiJournal, comments by peer reviewers will be made publicly available once an article is either submitted or accepted; peer reviewers can be either anonymous or non-anonymous. Authors must consider whether licenses that WikiJournal accepts and/or transparency of comments by peer reviewers suit their needs and wishes before choosing WikiJournal for free publication. If licenses and/or transparency do not, then other non-Wikimedia journals may be more appropriate choices for them.

Comparison to open-access journals

 * Note: The table may not list all publishers and journals due to the length and size of the website and various devices.


 * NC = noncommercial; ND = no derivatives

Dubious and predatory publications
Journals and publishers that are considered dubious and/or predatory are not (supposed to be) listed in this page. If a listed journal or publisher is found to be dubious and/or predatory, it can be either marked as dubious and/or predatory, or removed from one of the lists above. Authors willing to publish their own works to non-Wikimedia journals should be aware of such journals and publishers and be certain how authentic they are before submitting works to them. The below links can further explain how to tell whether a journal or publisher is highly reputable.
 * "Quality" at OpenAccess.nl
 * "Dubious OA Publishers" at Lund University Library
 * "Free Access to Scholarly Research and Unrestricted Reuse" at Enviro Research Publishers
 * "'Fake,' 'Predatory,' and 'Pseudo' Journals: Charlatans Threatening Trust in Science" at the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors

Content licensing
"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International" (CC BY 4.0) is the default license for articles in WikiJournal. Upon request, other acceptable licenses include any Wikipedia-compatible license or multi-licensing thereof. However, "noncommercial" and "no derivatives" licenses are not acceptable at Wikimedia projects. If an article is to be used for only noncommercial uses and/or cannot be derived into other works, other existing non-Wikimedia journals may be more suitable for those needs. See also WikiJournal User Group/Ethics statement.

Articles published on or before 1 January are in the public domain in the United States and are more suitable for Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive, and other websites that can hold public domain content.

Publication charges
Many publishers and journals require monetary charges for authors to release their works into Open Access. This is also true for works published under CC BY or CC BY-SA. WikiJournal, on the other hand, does not; rather publishing an article into one of its journals requires no costs. However, authors must consider how their works are to be distributed and used (see or ) before choosing WikiJournal for free publication.

Transparency of peer reviews
All comments made from peer reviewers will be made publicly available, at the latest upon article submission. The identities of peer reviewers are preferably made publicly available, but they may choose to be anonymous.

Peer review comments are generally made available publicly directly by direct wiki addition, or added as soon as possibly after reception by an editor. In some cases, the author may request that the peer review process is kept non-public. Many journals do not accept submissions that have been in the open at any time, and thereby authors may be harmed by premature disclosure of any or all of an article submission's details. In such cases, the peer review will be made public first after article publication.

Why transparency?
WikiJournals are unusual in their level of transparency. Transparent peer reviews allows for readers to get a deeper understanding of the material, particularly where it may be contentious. Also, even after at least 2 peer reviews, there may still be errors in the article, and open peer reviews allows readers to check whether these have been discussed earlier. Open peer reviews thereby give readers the ability to perform further quality checking of works.

Transparency is one of guiding principles valued and unanimously passed on 30 May 2013 as part of a resolution by the Wikimedia Foundation.