Recommendations for Owners and Publishers of Scientific Journals

Developed from principles drafted by representatives from journals, libraries, not-for-profit-publishers, and societies, these recommendations were formally updated by PEEER on 09 January 2025.

As communicators of knowledge that can benefit humanity and the world in which we live, publishers have a responsibility to ensure equitable (open) access for, and to, that information, by:

• ensuring the integrity of what is published by facilitating robust editorial and peer review processes
• checking for and managing issues regarding publishing ethics 
• long-term maintenance and preservation of the scholarly record
• enabling discoverability and access to journal content
• management of metadata to enable identification of the research article through indexing, search engines and other discovery services
• enabling management of copyright on behalf of authors, affiliated universities and societies
• ensuring long-term sustainability for journals 
• providing affordable high quality production, including copy-editing services that level differences in language proficiency 
• marketing and promoting journals and articles 
• being responsive to the needs of researchers, the scholarly community, editorial boards and societies, thus ensuring a mutually beneficial long-term relationship
• being transparent (at least with the journal/society leadership) about costs, profits, and reinvestments in the scholarly community  
• excluding non-disclosure clauses from contracts with editors
• prioritizing the quality over the quantity of science published
• assuring independence of editorial boards to fulfill the journal’s scholarly mission
• promoting mechanisms for referrals and re-use of editorial recommendations and peer reviews across journals and publishers

We support publishers who embrace philosophies and policies consistent with these principles — for example Purpose Led Publishing by AIP Publishing, the American Physical Society, and IOP Publishing — and encourage all publishers to be honest and transparent about their positions on such matters. 

These principles supercede an earlier version of this statement that is archived at https://peeer.net/publishers_v1/.

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