BiomedicalPublications

About this site

Biomedical Publications is an independent reference for data about biomedical journals: what they charge, how they review, where they are indexed and how long they take.

Why it exists

Deciding where to submit a paper means assembling facts that are scattered across a publisher's fee page, a registry entry, an index record and a policy document — and some of those facts are presented in whichever way suits the publisher. The specific figure researchers most need, the article processing charge, is often the hardest to find before submission, which is exactly the point at which it matters.

This site puts those facts on one page for 11,447 journals, with a link back to every source so you can check any of it.

What we are not

We are not a publisher. We do not operate any journal, we do not accept manuscripts, and we charge no submission or publication fee to anyone. If you have received an email inviting you to publish and it claims any association with this site, it is fraudulent.

We also take no payment from publishers. No journal can pay to appear here, to rank higher, to have unfavourable data removed, or to be described more kindly. There is no mechanism for it, because the pages are generated from open data rather than written by hand.

On the word “predatory”

We do not maintain a blacklist and we do not label individual journals as predatory. That is a considered position, not squeamishness. The best-known such list was taken offline in 2017 under legal pressure from a publisher it named, and lists of that kind age badly — journals change hands, editorial standards change, and a name once listed follows it indefinitely.

Instead we publish the verifiable facts: which registries list a journal, what review model it declares, whether it states its fees, whether it archives its content and assigns DOIs. When several of those are missing at once, that pattern tells you what you need to know, and it does so in a form you can show to a supervisor or an ethics committee.

How the data is built

Everything comes from open sources — principallyOpenAlex, which is CC0, and theDirectory of Open Access Journals. The full pipeline, including the judgement calls and the data we deliberately exclude, is documented in our methodology. The sources and their licences are listed underdata sources.

Where a source is unreliable we say so and omit the number rather than print it. OpenAlex's founding-year field is the clearest example: it dates PLoS ONE to 1806, so we do not display founding years at all.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know. Most errors will originate upstream, in which case correcting the source record fixes it here at the next rebuild — but tell us either way and we will look at whether our processing introduced it. Corrections and any other enquiry go tocontact.

Who runs this

This site is maintained by a small, named team rather than an anonymous brand. If our data is going to inform where you spend several thousand dollars, you are entitled to know who compiled it.

Abdel Rahman Shahboub

Founder

Abdel Rahman has spent over 15 years in IT and digital marketing, most of it building and running the technical side of tourism and e-commerce businesses across the Red Sea region and Germany. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer and Information Systems from Suez Canal University, Egypt, with the degree recognized as a full Bachelor equivalency by Germany’s ZAB (Zentralstelle für Ausländisches Bildungswesen).

He is currently IT & Digital Marketing Manager at Scuba World Divers, a PADI 5-Star dive center group operating across the Red Sea and Zanzibar, where he runs multilingual SEO (English, German, French, Dutch, Italian) across multiple locations and built the group’s technical SEO infrastructure — including the sitemap and llms.txt setup for AI-search visibility, the same kind of technical SEO work behind this site. He also works concurrently as a digital operations and finance coordinator for buyAtour.de GmbH, a German company, where he has audited hundreds of invoices for reconciliation accuracy — the same close-reading habit he applies to correcting journal data here.

He built Biomedical Publications’ data pipeline and technical SEO setup himself, including a self-built multi-agent AI reporting pipeline using the Claude API, and he is the one who reviews and corrects the underlying data when something is wrong. He holds Google certifications in Power Searching, Ads and Analytics, and several Microsoft IT certifications. He started this project because researchers kept needing a straight answer on what a journal actually costs and whether it is legitimate, and no independent, ad-free source gave them one.

Editorial responsibility

Abdel Rahman Shahboub is responsible for the methodology and for any correction issued. No one outside this list can change what a journal page says, and no publisher has editorial input — see the disclosure.

Reach any of us at help@biomedicalpublications.com, or via contact.

What we hold today