No. A journal”s economic or access policy does not determine its peer review policy. Most scholarly journals, whether open access or controlled-access journals, are peer-reviewed. There are both open and controlled journals that are not peer-reviewed.
- Just like traditional journals, reputable open access journal articles go through the same peer review process that articles published in traditional journals do.
-
Quality Open Access journals have peer-review, provide an option to request a waiver to OA publishing fees (if applicable), and are a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association or adhere to its Code of Conduct. However, predatory OA publishers do exist, and it is good to know what clues to look for to avoid predatory publishers.
- Open Access articles archived in repositories are also often peer-reviewed.
- In cases of the NIH PAP policy, the law only applies to peer-reviewed manuscripts that resulted from NIH funding be deposited into PubMed Central. Even in the case of author’s self archiving, those articles were published first in peer-reviewed journals before being made accessible through a repository.
Many Open Access journals can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals which provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals
