Editorial and affiliate disclosure

This site is free to use and costs money to run. Here is exactly how that is paid for, and what it does not buy.

How we may earn money

Some guides link to paid services researchers commonly use — language editing, statistical review, reference tools. Where such a link is an affiliate link, we may receive a commission if you buy something, at no additional cost to you. Any page containing such links says so at the top.

We may also display advertising. Where we do, it will be visibly distinguishable from editorial content.

What no amount of money buys

These are the lines, stated plainly:

• No journal or publisher can pay to be listed here, to rank higher, to be described more favourably, or to have data removed. Journal pages are generated from open data by a documented pipeline. There is no editorial override, so there is nothing to sell.
• No commission affects the data. Charges, indexing status, review models and metrics come from OpenAlex and DOAJ and are unaffected by any commercial relationship.
• No sponsored placement in the tools. The APC finder, matcher and directory rank by the criterion you select. Nobody can buy a position in those results.
• We do not sell your data. See ourprivacy policy — we collect very little, and the journal matcher never transmits your abstract at all.

How we choose what to recommend

Where a guide recommends a service, it is because it addresses the problem the guide is about. If a service we would recommend has no affiliate programme, we still recommend it. If one pays well but we would not use it, we leave it out.

The most common advice on this site — ask your librarian about institutional agreements, request a fee waiver, consider a journal that charges nothing — earns us nothing at all. We give it because it is what actually saves researchers money.

Conflicts of interest

We have no ownership stake in any publisher, journal, or author-services company, and no publisher has any stake in this site. If that changes, this page changes first.

Why we say all this

The subject of this site is transparency about publishing costs. Being vague about our own would be difficult to justify.