Are Open Access (OA) journals lower in quality than conventional journals? This is one of the main doubts researchers have. A doubt that once too often holds them back from publishing in actual OA journals.

Mari Vállez, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), tackles this question in a blog post she published earlier this month on LibTechNotes presenting a tool UOC developed to access OA journals with an impact factor.

Vállez opens her post with "Publishing scientific articles in open-access journals is perfectly compatible with publishing in journals with an impact factor.” Subsequently she explains the tool and the method they used.

Tool to access OA journals with impact factors



The tool is based on analyses of the following three platforms:

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) 
  
  DOAJ aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content and use "a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access”.
• Journal Citation Report (JCR)
  
  An annual publication by the Healthcare & Science division of Thomson Reuters. It provides information about academic journals in the sciences and social sciences, including impact factors. 
• SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
  
  A portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.) These indicators can be used to assess and analyze scientific domains.

To download the raw data or take a look at the created lists and infographics, go to Open Access Journals with Impact Factors.

Similar exercise in 2011 by Wouter Gerritsma

At the beginning of 2011, Wouter Gerritsma, Wageningen University and Research Centre (Netherlands), published on his website WoW! the list of all OA journals that were included in DOAJ and assigned a Journal Impact Factor in the JCR 2009.