Open Journal Quality Factor

Assesses the openness of a journal's governance, editorial policies, author charges, and reviewer guidelines.

1. 1.Open access statement publicly accessible
2. 2.Article Processing Charges (APC) clearly disclosed
3. 3.APC waiver or discount policy published
4. 4.Peer review type stated (single/double/open blind)
5. 5.Editorial workflow and timeline published
6. 6.Reviewer guidelines publicly available
7. 7.Retraction and correction policy stated
8. 8.Ethics and misconduct policy referenced (COPE or equivalent)
9. 9.Author copyright terms clearly defined
10. 10.License clearly stated per article (CC BY, CC BY-NC, etc.)
11. 11.Data availability / data sharing policy published
12. 12.Archiving / digital preservation policy disclosed
13. 13.Conflict of interest disclosure required from authors

Evaluates article-level metadata completeness including identifiers, abstracts, keywords, and reference lists.

1. 1.DOI registered with Crossref for all articles
2. 2.Structured abstract present in metadata
3. 3.Keywords indexed in metadata record
4. 4.ORCID supplied for at least one author per article
5. 5.Full author name (given + family) recorded
6. 6.Institutional affiliation (ROR preferred) in metadata
7. 7.Volume, issue, and page numbers present
8. 8.Publication date (YYYY-MM-DD) in machine-readable form
9. 9.Open reference list deposited with Crossref
10. 10.Funding information structured in metadata
11. 11.License URI in Crossref metadata
12. 12.Full-text URL (PDF/HTML) registered in Crossref

Measures editorial board transparency, geographic diversity, and reviewer independence.

1. 1.Editor-in-chief named with institutional affiliation
2. 2.Editorial board listed publicly with affiliations
3. 3.ORCID or other IDs provided for board members
4. 4.Board members span at least 3 countries
5. 5.Board refreshed / updated within last 24 months
6. 6.No overlapping publisher-board conflicts disclosed
7. 7.Reviewer independence policy stated
8. 8.Author self-nomination to reviewer pool prohibited or managed
9. 9.Publication ethics statement (COPE / ICMJE / equivalent)
10. 10.Anti-plagiarism check used (stated in workflow)

Assesses how well a journal exposes its content to indexing systems and aggregators.

1. 1.OAI-PMH endpoint active and returns Dublin Core records
2. 2.Listed or applied to DOAJ
3. 3.Indexed in OpenAlex (verified source ID present)
4. 4.Sitemap.xml published for crawlers
5. 5.HTTPS with valid TLS certificate
6. 6.Persistent DOI links resolve correctly (< 5% broken)
7. 7.Journal ISSN registered with ISSN Portal
8. 8.CrossMark policy registered (content version DOI)
9. 9.Robots.txt permits academic crawlers
10. 10.Schema.org structured data on article pages
11. 11.Google Scholar indexed (sample verified)

Evaluates whether a journal's citations are open, machine-readable, and tracked by open infrastructure.

1. 1.Open reference lists in Crossref (I4OC compliant)
2. 2.Articles indexed and cited in OpenCitations COCI
3. 3.Cited-by data available via Crossref or OpenAlex
4. 4.Average cited-by count > 0 for articles older than 18 months
5. 5.At least one article has ≥ 3 open citations
6. 6.References resolve to valid DOIs (< 10% broken)