Acceptance of your journal by FJN
The acceptance criteria will be revised annually, and will in general become gradually stricter over time. Accepted journals will be evaluated every 5 years to see whether they satisfy the current criteria, so they don’t have to change practices immediately when criteria are revised.
The current detailed criteria for a journal to be accepted by FJN are here. They can become somewhat technical, because we want to be transparent and not reject based on our gut feeling. The key points to keep in mind: a journal that is accepted
- is open-access AND does not charge authors for publication;
- is evidently scholarly from its website with sufficient information in English to show that it has an editorial and peer-review processes, editorial board, ethical policies (for editors, reviewers and authors), and ISSN.
- is well-established and actively publishing for over a year;
- would appoint a representative as a member of FJN; and
- would display FJN membership on its website.
There will be other criteria including compliance with the Fair Open Access Principles.
In addition to the explicit objective criteria, there are some softer criteria used by the steering committee, which will be specified as much as possible, but inevitably involve some judgment by the committee – hence the decision of the steering committee is final and not subject to appeal. Constructive feedback will be given, and journals rejected one year may apply again in future with no prejudice.
If you wish to apply on behalf of your journal, please use the form below. Note: if we cannot easily verify the information, the application will be put on hold, perhaps indefinitely. It is your responsibility to ensure that the URLs provided link to pages where all the information we want is clearly displayed (this may require the journal website to be edited).