Open Scholarship
Free-to-read academic journals
Every reputable journal we can verify that you can read without a subscription — grouped by discipline, with the funding model of each made explicit. 131 journals and platforms, and counting.
What the access tags mean
Tap to expand
Diamond / Platinum
Free to read and free to publish. No fees to anyone — usually run by a society, university or funder. The gold standard for equitable access.
Gold
Free to read, but the author (or their funder) pays an article-processing charge (APC) to publish. Waivers are often available.
Free to read / Bronze
Free to read on the publisher’s site, but without an open licence and often without a stated, durable policy. Includes society journals funded from other revenue.
Delayed
Behind a paywall at first, then made free to read after an embargo — commonly 6 to 12 months.
Subscribe-to-Open (S2O)
A subscription journal that opens the whole year’s content to everyone once enough libraries renew. No author fees.
Green
The published version may be paywalled, but the author’s accepted manuscript is legally free in a repository like PubMed Central or arXiv. This directory links to journals; green copies are found via those repositories.
Multidisciplinary 11
Large-scale journals and platforms that publish across every field. Several of the biggest names in open access — and the major preprint servers — live here.
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European Commission
Open publishing platform for Horizon Europe beneficiaries.
ScopusPMC -
Cornell University
Not peer-reviewed; the founding preprint server for physics, maths and CS.
Not indexed in major citation indexes -
eLife Sciences Publications
Publish-review-curate model; funded by Wellcome, HHMI, MPG and MRC.
DOAJScopusWoSPMC -
Center for Open Science
Not peer-reviewed; hosts SocArXiv, PsyArXiv and other subject servers.
Not indexed in major citation indexes -
Public Library of Science
The original mega-journal; sound-science peer review.
DOAJScopusWoSPMC -
Wellcome / F1000
Open, post-publication peer review for Wellcome-funded work.
ScopusPMC
Biology & Life Sciences 16
The life sciences have a deep free-to-read bench, from society journals to funder platforms. Microbiology in particular runs on public-health and society titles that have been open for years.
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Shared Science Publishers
Non-profit diamond journal for molecular microbiology.
ScopusPMC -
Microbiology Society
Sound-science journal with open post-publication peer review.
DOAJ -
Frontiers
High-volume OA; evaluate individual articles on their merits.
DOAJScopusWoSPMC -
American Society for Microbiology
ASM's flagship open-access microbiology journal.
DOAJScopusWoSPMC -
Public Library of Science
Leading open-access journal for microbial pathogenesis.
DOAJScopusWoSPMC
Medicine & Health 13
Government and intergovernmental agencies fund some of the strongest diamond journals anywhere — the CDC, WHO and ECDC titles below are free to read and free to publish.
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US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Free, peer-reviewed and public-domain; a model government journal.
DOAJScopusWoSPMC -
European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control
Europe's journal of record for infectious-disease surveillance.
DOAJScopusWoSPMC -
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
ScopusPMC
Chemistry 9
Chemistry has an unusually strong diamond tier — the Beilstein journals, ACS Central Science and RSC's Chemical Science are all free to read and free to publish.
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American Chemical Society
ACS's fully sponsored diamond flagship.
DOAJScopusWoSPMC -
Beilstein-Institut
Model diamond chemistry journal.
DOAJScopusWoSPMC -
Royal Society of Chemistry
RSC's flagship, made free to publish in 2015.
DOAJScopusWoSPMC -
American Chemical Society et al.
Not peer-reviewed; the chemistry preprint server.
Not indexed in major citation indexes -
MDPI
High-volume OA; evaluate individual articles on their merits.
DOAJScopusWoSPMC
Physics 10
Physics pioneered free scholarship with arXiv, and its high-energy sub-field funds journals collectively through SCOAP3. Community-run titles like Quantum and SciPost carry no fees at all.
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SISSA / Springer (SCOAP3)
Author fees covered collectively by the SCOAP3 consortium.
DOAJScopusWoS -
Verein zur Förderung des Open Access Publizierens in den Quantenwissenschaften
Community-run diamond journal for quantum science.
DOAJScopusWoS
Mathematics 8
Mathematics has the oldest diamond culture of any field: society- and department-run journals, arXiv overlays, and near-zero APCs are the norm rather than the exception.
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Diamond Open Access / Alliance of Diamond OA Journals
Overlay journal built on arXiv; near-zero running costs.
ScopusWoS
Computer Science 8
Machine-learning and theory communities run several flagship diamond journals — JMLR, JAIR and TMLR charge nothing to authors or readers and sit at the top of the field.
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JMLR / MIT
The field's flagship, community-run since 2000.
ScopusWoS -
Open Journals
Peer-reviews research software rather than papers.
DOAJ
Earth & Environment 9
The European Geosciences Union's Copernicus journals run transparent open peer review, and a handful of geological-survey titles are fully government-funded diamond.
Economics 6
The Econometric Society runs two flagship diamond journals, and several society titles are free to read even where the field still leans heavily on working papers.
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Kiel Institute for the World Economy / De Gruyter
DOAJScopus -
Spanish Economic Association / Springer
DOAJScopus
Business & Management 6
Free-to-read management research is thinner than in the sciences, but Latin American society journals and a growing set of gold titles cover the field.
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MDPI
High-volume OA; evaluate individual articles on their merits.
DOAJScopus
Political Science 5
A small but solid set of open society and university-press journals covers methods, governance and comparative politics.
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European Consortium for Political Research / Taylor & Francis
DOAJScopus
Law 7
US law reviews are a free-to-read anomaly: student-edited, no subscription, no APC. European diamond journals fill in comparative and EU law.
Social Sciences 8
Sociology, psychology and demography all have community-run diamond flagships that reject the APC model entirely — Sociological Science and Demographic Research among them.
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Frontiers
High-volume OA; evaluate individual articles on their merits.
DOAJScopusWoS -
American Sociological Association / SAGE
DOAJScopus
Humanities 8
The Open Library of Humanities and university publishers underwrite a strong diamond tier in philosophy, linguistics and digital humanities — no fees to authors or readers.
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Open Library of Humanities
Editors resigned from Elsevier's Lingua to found it.
DOAJScopus
Regional Platforms 7
These are not single journals but platforms hosting hundreds or thousands of free-to-read titles, largely outside the Anglophone commercial system. Each is a directory in its own right.
These are not single titles but platforms that host hundreds or thousands of free journals each. Treat them as directories to explore rather than journals to submit to.
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Africa
The largest collection of African-published scholarly journals.
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Canada (French & English)
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Latin America, Caribbean & Iberia
Caveats & cautions
“Free to read” is not the same as “reputable.” Use this list to find candidates, then do your own diligence before submitting. A few things worth knowing:
Predatory publishers exist
Some outfits charge a fee and skip real peer review. The clearest case is OMICS Group: in 2019 a US federal court, on an FTC action, ordered it to pay a judgment of about $50.1 million for deceptive practices. If a journal promises implausibly fast review and pressures you to pay, walk away.
Contested ≠ predatory
High-volume open-access publishers such as MDPI, Frontiers and Hindawi are debated in the community — some editorial boards have resigned over special-issue volume, and some titles have faced mass retractions. But they are indexed and many titles are sound. Judge these title by title, and article by article — not as a blanket verdict. Where we list them, the note says as much.
Diamond can fracture
A journal that is free to publish today depends on a grant, a society budget or volunteer labour. That funding can lapse, and a diamond journal can quietly introduce a fee. That is exactly why every record here carries a verified-on date rather than a permanent promise.
Beall’s List is a blunt instrument
Jeffrey Beall’s list of “potential predatory” publishers was influential but was taken down in 2017, is no longer maintained, and swept up legitimate journals alongside bad actors. Treat any archived copy as a prompt to investigate, not a verdict.
Preprints are not peer-reviewed
arXiv, bioRxiv, ChemRxiv and the like are invaluable, but a preprint has not passed peer review. We tag them clearly. Cite them as preprints, and prefer the peer-reviewed version once it exists.
This page ages
Fees, ownership and access policies change. We re-check periodically, but if you find something out of date, trust the journal’s own site over this page — and let us know.
Two free tools worth a look before you submit: the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Think. Check. Submit.