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1. About
There is a growing consensus in academia that the current scientific publishing system is unsustainable. The academic publishing market generates approximately €7.6 billion annually, with a handful of publishers capturing the majority of this revenue while maintaining profit margins of 30–40% — higher than many technology companies.
Several factors have contributed to this crisis:
- High profit margins of major publishers: Five publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and SAGE) control over 50% of published papers in some fields, extracting billions in profits from publicly funded research.
- Excessive Article Processing Charges (APCs): While the true cost of publishing an article is estimated at €200–€1,000, APCs at prestigious journals can exceed €9,500.
- Predatory journals: An estimated 420,000 articles were published in predatory journals in 2014 alone, undermining scientific integrity.
- Scarcity of peer reviewers: The publish-or-perish culture has created unsustainable demands on the peer review system.
Where to Publish? was created to highlight three factors that, combined, represent a sustainable alternative: non-profit publishers, open access, and society-based journals. Our goal is to generate awareness of these alternatives and help researchers make informed decisions about where to submit their work and for whom they are willing to review or edit.
Change is possible. Alternatives exist. Let's make it happen.
Where to Publish? focuses exclusively on life sciences for several reasons:
This project was initiated by researchers in the life sciences who experienced firsthand the challenges of navigating the publishing landscape in biology. Our expertise lies in this domain, allowing us to curate and evaluate journals with appropriate disciplinary knowledge.
Biology has a particularly pronounced obsession with high-impact journals. Nature, Science, and Cell — along with their family of subsidiary journals — dominate the prestige hierarchy in ways that differ from fields like mathematics or computer science. The Impact Factor has been criticized as "unscientific and arbitrary," yet it continues to disproportionately influence careers, funding, and tenure decisions in the life sciences.
While physics established arXiv in 1991, biology only embraced preprints with the founding of bioRxiv in November 2013 — a 22-year gap. This delayed adoption reflects the stronger grip of traditional publishing gatekeepers in biology compared to other disciplines.
The pressure to publish in high-impact journals has contributed to biology's reproducibility crisis. The incentive to produce "flashy, novel findings" over solid, reproducible work is particularly acute in the life sciences, where some analyses suggest fewer than 40% of preclinical studies can be replicated.
Despite these challenges, biology has a rich ecosystem of society-run journals that offer viable alternatives: PLOS, eLife, the Company of Biologists, EMBO, and many national and international scientific societies publish high-quality journals with more sustainable business models.
The database includes journals publishing research in the life sciences, organized into ten fields:
- Generalist
- Anatomy & Physiology
- Cancer
- Development
- Ecology & Evolution
- Genetics & Genomics
- Immunology
- Molecular & Cellular Biology
- Neurosciences
- Plants
- Life sciences focus: Journals must publish research relevant to biology or biomedicine.
- Non-predatory: We cross-reference journals against the Sorbonne University list of presumed non-predatory journals, which is curated by consulting 58 medical specialty experts and updated quarterly.
- Verifiable information: Journals must have publicly available information about their publisher, business model, and editorial policies.
- Predatory journals: Journals exhibiting characteristics of predatory publishing — false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial practices, prioritizing profit over scholarship — are excluded.
- Journals outside biology: While some generalist journals (e.g., PNAS, Science) publish biology alongside other disciplines, we do not include journals focused entirely on other fields.
Where to Publish? is maintained by:
- Thibault Latrille — Postdoc - GitHub · Website · Email
- Nicolas Clairis — Postdoc— GitHub
- Diego A Hartasánchez — Postdoc — GitHub
We welcome contributions from the scientific community. See Contributing to get involved.