Predatory journals spam thousands of scientists and other researchers, offering to publish their work for a fee, without actually conducting peer review.
Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, kept a list of these illegitimate journal publishers to help researchers avoid being taken in; he was forced to stop in 2017. An archived version of the last update of the list is here.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a list of quality, peer reviewed open access journals. DOAJ is co-author to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing and journals included are expected to follow these principles. The DOAJ maintains a list of journals that have been accepted into or removed from the DOAJ.
Research on predatory journals from the Centre for Journalology.
Related article: “A paper by Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel was accepted by two scientific journals.” Dec. 7, 2014. Details here.
Peer-reviewed journals contain articles that are critically assessed by other experts and scholars in the field before the article is published. The peer review process offers the highest standard of scholarly scrutiny available in academic publishing.
The following considerations, adapted from the St. Francis Xavier University Library and Heather Morrison's Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, may be helpful in assessing both Open Access and non-OA journals.