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Free journal checker
Look up a journal by name or ISSN: publisher, open-access status, DOAJ listing, APC and h-index.
Free: 5 runs a day per IP address, shared across the free tools. No account. One journal per run, by name or ISSN.
Input
Results
Press Run to see live results here. See a saved sample result below
How the journal checker works
- 1
Enter a name or ISSN
Type the journal’s name, or its ISSN for an exact match. The tool reads the first line only, so check one journal at a time.
- 2
OpenAlex, then DOAJ
The journal is found in OpenAlex first, where an exact name match is preferred over a merely popular one. Its ISSNs are then used to look it up in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
- 3
Read the profile
You get six facts on one card: publisher, open access or not, whether it is listed in DOAJ, the article processing charge, ISSN and h-index. The journal name links to its homepage.
Sample result from the journal checker
Saved from a real run of this tool on 13 October 2026, using the example input that is pre-filled above. Live results can differ as the databases change.
Example input
Nature Communications
In this run the APC figure came from DOAJ, which has listed the journal since 11 January 2016.
Saved result
Nature Communications (Nature Portfolio): listed in DOAJ, h-index 743, 93278 works in OpenAlex.
- Publisher
- Nature Portfolio
- Open access
- Yes
- Listed in DOAJ
- Yes
- APC
- 6,150 EUR
- ISSN
- 2041-1723
- h-index
- 743
What a DOAJ listing tells you
DOAJ is a directory of open-access journals that journals apply to join. A “Yes” here means the journal is in that directory today. The tool checks DOAJ by ISSN, so the answer is about this exact journal and not one with a similar name.
A “No” needs more care. Subscription and hybrid journals are not in DOAJ by design, so most established subscription titles show “No”. The case that deserves a closer look is a journal that is fully open access and still not listed: check its peer review and its fees before you submit.
Where the APC figure comes from
When the journal is in DOAJ, the article processing charge shown is DOAJ’s, because it is reported by the journal itself. If DOAJ says the journal charges nothing, the card shows “None”. When the journal is not in DOAJ, the figure from OpenAlex is used if there is one, and a dash means neither source has a figure.
Treat it as a list price in the currency the source reports. Waivers, discounts and institutional agreements are not included, so confirm the current fee on the journal’s own site.
Why there is no impact factor
The Journal Impact Factor is licensed data and is not available from open sources, so this tool does not return it. What it shows instead is the journal’s h-index from OpenAlex: the largest number h such that h of its papers have at least h citations each.
The two are not interchangeable. An h-index grows with a journal’s age and size, so use it to compare similar journals, not as a stand-in for the impact factor.
FAQ
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- Journal lookups for AI agents
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Data sources behind this tool: OpenAlex data source, DOAJ data source. All ScholarMuse web tools
The same lookup, inside Claude or ChatGPT
Connect ScholarMuse once and your agent can look up each journal on your shortlist and compare them in one answer. Calls from an agent need an account and use credits.