Different journals have different levels of openness. The following can be used as a guideline to determine the level of openness of your journal:

• MIAO Assessment Tool

• Open policy finder - Formerly Sherpa services

• Jane Bio Semantics – Find journals to publish in

• Open Access Spectrum (OAS) Evaluation Toolkit

Open Access Spectrum (OAS) Evaluation Toolkit Explained

Reader Rights Score

What is the journal Open Access policy? No passwords should be required to access the full text. The journal should be OAI-PMH compliant, meaning the metadata and full text should be open for harvesters to harvest and index. The more open, the better. An example is the SAJLIS OA policy at http://sajlis.journals.ac.za/pub/about/editorialPolicies#openAccessPolicy

Reuse Rights Score

Can the articles published in the journal be reused, and under what conditions? A machine-readable version of the CC-BY license should be embedded in the footer area of the website for the journal. Choose the license and generate the code at http://creativecommons.org/choose/

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.

Copyright Score

Copyright for Open Access journal articles usually resides with the authors of the articles, and it should be indicated as such on the journal web site.

Author Posting Rights Score

Explicitly state the policy of the journal on rights authors have to disseminate the OA article authored by them beyond the OA journal platform, for example uploading it to an institutional repository, to a personal website, etc. 

Automatic Posting Score

What is the policy of the journal in terms of making articles automatically available in trusted third-party repositories (e.g. Bioline, PubMed Central, OpenAire, SciELO South Africa), immediately upon publication. This policy should be explicitly stated under About. 

Machine Readability Score

This information is part of the OJS setup for the journal. Indicate the base URL for the journal, for harvesting purposes.