Following requests from scientists who have have no funds to pay author’s fees to get their research published in a journal, we are starting below a list of Free High Quality Journals, which do not charge any article fees. To keep focused, we will only list journals directly relevant to the field of gene regulation.
Free — determined by whether the author is mandatory required to pay for the publication in the journal or not (this excludes optional payments, such as optional open-access, optional colour figures, optional language correction services, etc). Some open-access journals declared that they temporarily allow free submissions (e.g. for the first several years); such journals will be also included in the list below. (BTW, the best of the two worlds are journals which are free both for authors and readers, such as Wellcome Open Research).
High quality — determined by the overall journal’s quality as based on the composition of the editorial board, editorial policies, thorough peer-review, etc. We do not use IF and journal ranks to stratify journals, only to prove that all journals selected below are good enough to be included in this list.
List of high quality journals relevant to gene regulation, which do not charge author’s fees (alphabetic)
- AIMS Biophysics and AIMS Genetics (AIMS press, launched in 2014, free open-access for the first three years, $200 per article in the following years).
- Annals of Botany (Oxford University Press, IF: 4.0, Optional OA)
- Annual Reviews of Biophysics (Traditional, IF: 12.250, rank: 1/74); Also see Annual Reviews of Genetics, Annual Reviews of Biochemistry and other Annual Reviews Journals (but these are not for primary research articles);
- BioEssays (Wiley, optional OA, IF: 4.730);
- Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry (Free OA, IF: 2.762) and Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology (Free OA, IF: 2.670).
- Bioinformatics (Oxford Press, optional OA. IF: 4.981, rank: 3/56);
- Biology Letters (Royal Society. IF: 3.3);
- Biopolymers (Wiley, optional OA. IF: 2.385, rank: 40/73, 170/289);
- Briefings in Bioinformatics (Oxford Press, optional OA. IF: 9.617, rank: 3/79; 2/56);
- Chromosoma (Springer Nature, classical, IF: 4.3 (2020))
- Current Biology (Cell Press, IF: 9.6);
- Current Genetics (Springer, IF: 3.5);
- Development (The Company of Biologists, optional OA. IF: 5.8);
- Gene (Elsevier, optional OA, IF: 2.135);
- Genes to Cells (Wiley, optional OA, IF: 1.8);
- Genetics (Oxford Press, IF: 4.4);
- Journal of Biological Physics (Springer, traditional, IF: 1.152, rank: 61/74);
- Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics (Tailor and Francis, optional OA, IF: 2.919, rank: 30/74);
- Journal of Cell Science (The Company of Biologists, IF: 4.706, free for authors, free for readers after 6 moths + optional immediate OA);
- Journal of Experimental Botany (Oxford University Press, IF: 5.4);
- Journal of Molecular Biology (Elsevier, traditional, IF: 4.333);
- Journal of Theoretical Biology (Elsevier, traditional, IF: 2.116);
- Molecular BioSystems (Royal Society of Chemistry, optional OA, IF: 3.21);
- Molecular Microbiology (Wiley, optional OA, IF: 3.8)
- New Phytologist (Viley, IF: 7.4, rank: 7/222, Optional OA)
- Nature Genetics (Springer Nature, IF: 27.6)
- Nature Structural and Molecular Biology (Springer Nature, IF: 12)
- Philosophy, Theory and Practice in Biology (University of Michigan, OA, free for authors)
- Physical Biology (IOP Science, optional OA, IF: 2.536, rank: 28/74);
- ScienceOpen Research (ScienceOpen, free OA, launched in 2014);
- The Plant Journal (Wiley, Optional OA, IF: 5.8, rank: 12/223);
- Wellcome Open Research (Wellcome Trust, free for all WT-funded researchers, OA).
This list is just started, please send me your suggestions by email!