For libraries and research offices

The same dataset that helps an individual researcher choose a journal answers different questions when you are responsible for a whole institution's publishing spend and for the researchers making those decisions.

What the dataset covers

• 11,447 biomedical journals with a verified ISSN and a recent publication record.
• 4,496 with a published article processing charge; median $3,140, maximum $12,690.
• 1,290 recording no publication charge, and 1,838 that state they offer waivers.
• 3,620 with a full DOAJ record, carrying declared review model, licence, copyright and archiving policy.
• 1,456 publishers across 21 fields and 133 countries.

Every figure above is computed live from the same dataset the public tools use, so it does not go stale between page updates.

Benchmarking publication spend

Charges vary by roughly an order of magnitude for editorially comparable work, and 215 journals charge more than $5,000. If you are negotiating a transformative agreement or reviewing what your researchers actually paid last year, a neutral reference for list prices is difficult to assemble from publisher sites alone.

The APC finder filters the full set by charge, open-access status, waiver availability and time to publication. For portfolio-level work, the underlying data is also available directly — see data sources for the licence terms, which derive from OpenAlex (CC0) and DOAJ.

Supporting researchers before they submit

Most costly publishing mistakes are made before anyone in the library hears about them: a fee discovered at acceptance, a licence that fails a funder's conditions, an APC paid from a grant when an agreement already covered it.

• Journal check — registry lookups and disclosure checks on any journal, suitable for linking from your own research-support pages.
• The seven-step verification guide — written to be shared directly with researchers or used in training.
• Plan S compliance — the route, licence and embargo checks funded authors need before submitting.
• Transformative agreements — written to help researchers find out whether your institution already has one.
• Glossary — deep-linkable definitions you can cite from your own guidance.

All of it is free to use and free to link to. There is no account, no paywall and no rate limit on the public tools.

Legitimacy checks at scale

For research offices fielding questions about unfamiliar journals, the useful output is not a verdict but a documented set of facts: what registries hold a record, what the journal discloses about review and fees, whether it archives and assigns DOIs.

That is deliberately what our journal pages provide. We publish no blacklist — the reasoning is set out in the methodology — because a documented factual record is more defensible in an internal process than a label somebody else assigned.

Independence

We are not a publisher, we operate no journals, and we accept no payment from publishers for inclusion, ranking or the removal of unfavourable data. The full position is on the editorial and affiliate disclosure page, and the data pipeline is described in the methodology.

Get in touch

If you are a librarian, research-office lead or consortium negotiator and want to discuss bulk data access, a benchmarking question, or linking these tools from your own research-support pages, we would like to hear from you.

Email help@biomedicalpublications.com with “institutional enquiry” in the subject line, and tell us your institution and what you are trying to work out.

Other ways to reach us, including for corrections and press, are on the contact page.