You finish a draft and hit the least scientific step in the whole process: picking where to send it. You ask a labmate. You squint at a rankings site that wants a subscription. You open a journal's "aims and scope" page and try to reverse-engineer whether your paper belongs. None of these things have read your paper.
Folio's new Journal Index does โ and it is built entirely on open data.
An index that doesn't gatekeep
Open Journals in the top navigation. Search any journal and you get a single, readable briefing: its fields and scope, open-access and DOAJ status, the article-processing charge, and the metrics that matter โ works, citations, h-index, a recent citation average.
Every number comes from open sources (OpenAlex, DOAJ, CrossRef). We deliberately do not show the licensed Impact Factor, and we never slap a "predatory" label on anyone. Instead we show verifiable signals โ is it indexed in DOAJ, does it have a real ISSN and a real publication history โ and let you draw the conclusion. The recent-articles feed is cleaned up too: front matter, mastheads, and indexes are filtered out, so you see actual research. Click any article to read its abstract and save it to your library in one click.
There are dozens of journal directories already. We did not build this to out-list them. We built it because an index that lives next to your draft can do something none of them can: it can be about your work.
The scout: point it at a draft
Here is the part that changes the question from "what are the big journals in my area?" to "where does this go?"
Open Journals, choose Have a draft?, and pick one of your documents. The scout ranks journals by fit, and it tells you why in plain language:
- Journals you already cite. The venues your bibliography leans on are usually your strongest targets โ and the scout counts them.
- Journals publishing work like yours. This is the new part. Folio takes your draft, matches it against the literature, and finds the journals where the most similar papers are actually appearing โ surfacing good fits you might not have cited yet.
- Your field.
Each result carries its reasons right on the card: "You cite 4 papers here ยท 6 similar papers published here ยท Matches your field." No mystery score, no black box โ just the open signals, shown.
And it works before you have cited a thing. A title and a few sentences are enough for the scout to have an opinion. You can reach it from inside the editor, too โ it is in the Export menu and the command palette, scoped to whatever you are writing.
Closest to your draft
On any journal's page, you can flip it around: pick one of your drafts and Folio ranks that journal's recent articles by how closely they match your writing. It is a quick gut-check โ if the journal's latest papers read like neighbors of yours, you are in the right neighborhood. If nothing is close, that tells you something too.
A starting point, not a verdict
A tool can narrow the field; it cannot make the call. The scope, the aims, the fit with a special issue, the editor you met at a conference โ those are yours to weigh. Folio gives you an honest, open-data shortlist and gets out of the way. Always read a journal's own guidelines before you submit.
Try it
If you have a draft with even a few cited sources, the scout already has something useful to say. Open Journals and point it at your work.
Folio is a research workspace built around integrity โ real sources, verified citations, and now an open, in-context way to decide where your work belongs. Start for free.