Building a journal accreditation system
How journals could be assessed without favouring size, wealth or brand
In the previous post I outlined a proposal developed with colleagues and led by Ken Timmis: journals seeking access to publicly funded article processing charges (APCs) would need to satisfy defined standards of editorial quality, transparency and accountability. That proposal requires an accreditation system.
The first question is who decides whether a journal meets those standards. The answer cannot be publishers themselves. Publishers have an important role in scholarly communication, but accreditation exists because independent assessment is sometimes necessary. Universities, hospitals and laboratories are not left simply to declare themselves trustworthy. The same logic should apply to journals receiving public money.
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A journal accreditation system would require standards, assessment and oversight. Standards define what journals are expected to do. Assessment determines whether journals meet those expectations. Oversight ensures that accreditation remains credible and transparent.
Standards are not hard to imagine. Most researchers already have a working understanding of responsible editorial practice. Editorial decisions should be independent. Peer review should be genuine. Governance should be transparent. Conflicts of interest should be managed. Corrections and retractions should be handled responsibly. Reviewers and editors should be treated as contributors to scholarship rather than as invisible labour.
The challenge is building a system that distinguishes responsible journals from irresponsible ones without creating another bureaucratic obstacle, or another route through which established publishers strengthen their position.
Many existing publishing hierarchies are sustained by reputation, wealth and market power. Accreditation must not reproduce those hierarchies under a different name. Large, expensive or established journals should receive no special treatment because of their size, price or history. The same applies in the other direction. Small scholar-led journals, society journals and community-based publishing initiatives may be valuable, but they should also be assessed on evidence of editorial responsibility.
A credible system would assess practices rather than brands. It could draw on periodic review, documentary evidence, public reporting, independent audit and community feedback. Different fields may require different procedures, but the aim would be the same: to establish whether a journal meets agreed standards of editorial practice.
Learned societies could play an important role. They possess disciplinary expertise and understand the practical realities of publication in their fields. Their involvement would help ensure that accreditation reflects the needs of scholarship rather than the commercial interests of any particular publisher or the preferences of a single publishing model.
Funding agencies would be equally important, and in practical terms arrguably decisive. They control the conditions under which public money is used to pay publication charges. If funders require that APCs are paid only to accredited journals, accreditation becomes a condition attached to the use of public funds. That would give the system force without requiring every university, institute or individual researcher to make separate judgements about each journal.
This role would need to be exercised carefully. Funders should not decide editorial standards alone, nor should they become arbiters of disciplinary quality. Their task would be to support and enforce a system developed with scholarly communities, learned societies, libraries, research institutions and independent oversight. Used in this way, funder policy would connect public spending to editorial responsibility while leaving the assessment of scholarly practice in appropriate hands.
The accreditation body would require careful governance. It would need independence from commercial publishing interests, transparent procedures, clear criteria, and mechanisms for appeal and periodic review. Its legitimacy would depend on trust in the process, so the body responsible for accreditation would need to meet the standards of openness and accountability that it expects from journals.
No accreditation system will be perfect. Scientific publishing already operates through imperfect systems, including journal prestige, impact factors, indexing services, publisher reputation and institutional habit. The question is whether public money should continue to flow through those systems without meaningful scrutiny of the journals receiving it.
Accreditation offers a practical route forward. It would provide a way of evaluating journals against agreed standards and linking public support to responsible editorial practice. The next question concerns the standards themselves. What should journals be required to demonstrate in order to earn accreditation? That question leads directly to the Journal Code of Conduct — the subject of the next post.