Open Scholarship
Free-to-read academic journals: a verified list
This page lists 131 academic journals and platforms that anyone can read without a subscription, across 14 disciplines, each checked by a person on 14 July 2026 and tagged with who pays to publish. 52 are diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), 60 are gold open access (the author or funder pays an article-processing charge, APC), and the remaining 19 are free-to-read titles, delayed-access journals, preprint servers or regional platforms.
What do the access tags mean?
Tap to expand
Each entry on this page carries one access tag. The tag says who can read the journal and who pays to publish in it. The table compares the models; the definitions below it go into more detail.
| Access model | Free to read? | Who pays to publish | Open licence (typical) | Entries on this page | Example from this list |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diamond / Platinum | Yes | No one. No article-processing charge (APC) for authors. | Usually an open Creative Commons licence | 52 | Journal of Machine Learning Research |
| Gold | Yes | The author or their funder pays an APC | Usually an open Creative Commons licence | 60 | PLOS ONE |
| Free to read / Bronze | Yes | Varies; often no fee | Often none; the publisher keeps copyright | 8 | Harvard Law Review |
| Delayed | After an embargo, typically 6 to 12 months | Varies by journal | Varies | 1 | Journal of Cell Biology |
| Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) | Yes, in years when enough libraries subscribe | No author fee; subscribing libraries fund it | Usually an open Creative Commons licence | None tagged yet | — |
| Green | Yes, as the author’s accepted manuscript in a repository | Depends on the journal | Set by the repository and publisher | Not a journal tag | Found via PubMed Central or arXiv |
| Preprint server | Yes | No fee | Chosen by the author | 3 | arXiv |
| Regional platform | Yes | Varies by hosted journal | Varies by hosted journal | 7 | SciELO |
Diamond / Platinum
A diamond open-access journal (also called platinum) is free to read and free to publish in. No article-processing charge (APC) is paid by anyone; a society, university, funder or government covers the cost. Diamond is the most equitable access model.
Gold
A gold open-access journal is free to read, but the author or their funder pays an article-processing charge (APC) to publish. Many gold journals offer APC waivers for authors in lower-income countries.
Free to read / Bronze
A free-to-read (bronze) journal is free to read on the publisher’s own site, but without an open licence and often without a stated, durable policy. Society journals funded from other revenue, and student-edited US law reviews, sit here.
Delayed
A delayed open-access journal keeps new articles behind a paywall at first, then makes them free to read after an embargo, commonly 6 to 12 months. Older articles in a delayed journal are free; the newest are not.
Subscribe-to-Open (S2O)
A Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) journal is a subscription journal that opens the whole year’s content to everyone once enough libraries renew. Authors pay no fee. If subscriptions fall short, that year stays paywalled.
Green
Green open access means the published version may be paywalled, but the author’s accepted manuscript is legally free in a repository such as PubMed Central (PMC) or arXiv. This directory links to journals; green copies are found through those repositories.
“By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.”
Multidisciplinary 11
This list includes 11 free-to-read Multidisciplinary journals, 1 of them diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), including Open Research Europe, arXiv and eLife. 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.
-
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
This list includes 16 free-to-read Biology & Life Sciences journals, 1 of them diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), including Microbial Cell, Access Microbiology and Biology Open. 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.
-
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
This list includes 13 free-to-read Medicine & Health journals, 5 of them diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), including Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Deutsches Ärzteblatt International and Emerging Infectious Diseases. 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.
-
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
This list includes 9 free-to-read Chemistry journals, 4 of them diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), including ACS Central Science, Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology and Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry. 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.
-
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
This list includes 10 free-to-read Physics journals, 5 of them diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), including Journal of High Energy Physics, Living Reviews in Relativity and Physics Letters B. 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.
-
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
This list includes 8 free-to-read Mathematics journals, 7 of them diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), including Annales Henri Lebesgue, Discrete Analysis and Documenta Mathematica. 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.
-
Diamond Open Access / Alliance of Diamond OA Journals
Overlay journal built on arXiv; near-zero running costs.
ScopusWoS
Computer Science 8
This list includes 8 free-to-read Computer Science journals, 6 of them diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), including Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Journal of Machine Learning Research and Journal of Open Source Software. 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.
-
JMLR / MIT
The field's flagship, community-run since 2000.
ScopusWoS -
Open Journals
Peer-reviews research software rather than papers.
DOAJ
Earth & Environment 9
This list includes 9 free-to-read Earth & Environment journals, 2 of them diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), including Fennia — International Journal of Geography, GEUS Bulletin and Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. 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
This list includes 6 free-to-read Economics journals, 4 of them diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), including Economics: The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, Latin American Journal of Economics and Quantitative Economics. 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.
-
Kiel Institute for the World Economy / De Gruyter
DOAJScopus -
Spanish Economic Association / Springer
DOAJScopus
Business & Management 6
This list includes 6 free-to-read Business & Management journals, 3 of them diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), including BAR — Brazilian Administration Review, Future Business Journal and RAUSP Management Journal. 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.
-
MDPI
High-volume OA; evaluate individual articles on their merits.
DOAJScopus
Political Science 5
This list includes 5 free-to-read Political Science journals, 2 of them diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), including European Journal of Government and Economics, Journal of Deliberative Democracy and Political Research Exchange. A small but solid set of open society and university-press journals covers methods, governance and comparative politics.
-
European Consortium for Political Research / Taylor & Francis
DOAJScopus
Law 7
This list includes 7 free-to-read Law journals, 2 of them diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), including German Law Journal, Utrecht Law Review and Columbia Law Review. 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
This list includes 8 free-to-read Social Sciences journals, 4 of them diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), including Demographic Research, Judgment and Decision Making and Meta-Psychology. Sociology, psychology and demography all have community-run diamond flagships that reject the APC model entirely — Sociological Science and Demographic Research among them.
-
Frontiers
High-volume OA; evaluate individual articles on their merits.
DOAJScopusWoS -
American Sociological Association / SAGE
DOAJScopus
Humanities 8
This list includes 8 free-to-read Humanities journals, 6 of them diamond open access (no fees for authors or readers), including Digital Humanities Quarterly, Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy and Glossa: a journal of general linguistics. 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.
-
Open Library of Humanities
Editors resigned from Elsevier's Lingua to found it.
DOAJScopus
Regional Platforms 7
This list includes 7 regional platforms that each host hundreds or thousands of free-to-read journals, including African Journals OnLine (AJOL), Érudit and Free Journal Network. 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 regional platforms are not single titles but services that host hundreds or thousands of free journals each. Treat them as directories to explore rather than journals to submit to.
-
Africa
The largest collection of African-published scholarly journals.
-
Canada (French & English)
-
Latin America, Caribbean & Iberia
How do I check a free journal is not predatory?
Before submitting to any journal on this page, run three checks: confirm the journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), confirm the current fee on the journal’s own website, and work through the Think. Check. Submit. checklist. “Free to read” is not the same as “reputable.” Use this list to find candidates, then do your own diligence. A few things worth knowing:
Predatory publishers exist
Predatory publishers charge a fee and skip real peer review. The clearest case is OMICS Group: in 2019 the US District Court for the District of Nevada, in a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), ordered OMICS Group and its owner to pay a judgment of about $50.1 million for deceptive practices, including false claims of rigorous peer review and hidden publishing fees. 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 research community: some editorial boards have resigned over special-issue volume, and some titles have faced mass retractions. But MDPI, Frontiers and Hindawi journals are indexed, and many of their titles are sound. Judge these publishers title by title, and article by article, not as a blanket verdict. Where this list includes one of their titles, the card’s note says as much.
Diamond can fracture
A diamond journal that is free to publish in 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 on this page carries a verified-on date rather than a permanent promise.
Beall’s List is a blunt instrument
Beall’s List, Jeffrey Beall’s list of “potential predatory” publishers, was influential but was taken down in January 2017, is no longer maintained, and swept up legitimate journals alongside bad actors. Treat any archived copy of Beall’s List as a prompt to investigate, not a verdict.
Preprints are not peer-reviewed
Preprint servers such as arXiv, bioRxiv and ChemRxiv are invaluable, but a preprint has not passed peer review. This list tags preprint servers clearly. Cite a preprint as a preprint, and prefer the peer-reviewed version once it exists.
This page ages
Journal fees, ownership and access policies change. This list is re-checked periodically (most recently 14 July 2026), 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.
How this list is compiled
A journal or platform is included only if it is reputable, can be read without a subscription, and a person has checked its link and fee status. Every entry is a record in one data file, and every count on this page (the 131 total, the 52 diamond titles, the per-discipline numbers) is generated from that file at build time, so the prose cannot drift from the data. Each record carries the date it was last verified; the most recent check was 14 July 2026. Within each discipline, diamond journals are listed first, then the rest alphabetically.
Frequently asked questions about free-to-read journals
Are free-to-read journals peer reviewed?
Being free to read says nothing about peer review. Most journals on this page run editorial peer review, but the exceptions are tagged: the 3 preprint servers (arXiv, OSF Preprints and ChemRxiv) post papers before any review, US law reviews are student-edited, and regional platforms host journals with their own policies. Check a journal’s editorial-policy page before you cite or submit.
What is a diamond open access journal?
A diamond (or platinum) open access journal is free to read and free to publish in: neither readers nor authors pay, because a society, university, funder or government covers the cost. 52 of the 131 entries on this page are diamond, and Mathematics has the highest share, with 7 of its 8 journals diamond.
Do free-to-read journals charge authors to publish?
Some do. Of the 131 entries on this page, 64 charge no author fee, 53 charge an article-processing charge (APC), 9 charge an APC but offer waivers, and 5 vary by article type or author country. Each card shows the fee status as it was on its verified-on date.
How do I check whether a free journal is predatory?
Check that the journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), that its fees are stated clearly on its own website, that it names a real editorial board, and that it is indexed in Scopus, Web of Science or PubMed Central. Then work through the Think. Check. Submit. checklist. Promises of very fast peer review and pressure to pay are warning signs: in 2019 a US federal court ordered OMICS Group, which made such claims, to pay a $50.1 million judgment in a Federal Trade Commission case.
Is this list the same as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)?
No. DOAJ is a searchable index of thousands of open access journals that meet its criteria; this page is a hand-checked shortlist of 131 reputable titles and platforms. 90 of the entries here are also in DOAJ. The rest are regional platforms, preprint servers, free-to-read titles without an open licence, or journals that have not applied to DOAJ.
How often is this list verified?
Every record carries a verified-on date showing when a person last re-checked its link and fee status; the most recent check was 14 July 2026. Re-checks are periodic rather than on a fixed schedule, so treat the journal’s own website as the authority if the two disagree.
How can I read a paywalled article for free, legally?
Look for a green open access copy: many publishers let authors deposit the accepted manuscript in a repository such as PubMed Central, arXiv or a university repository, where it is free to read. Delayed-access journals, such as Journal of Cell Biology on this list, also open articles after an embargo of typically 6 to 12 months.
Which disciplines have the most free journals on this list?
Biology & Life Sciences has the most entries on this page with 16, followed by Medicine & Health with 13 and Multidisciplinary with 11. Mathematics has the highest share of diamond journals, with 7 of its 8 titles free for both authors and readers.