A Special issue on predatory journals : The Author-pays open access journal is the biggest current threat to science
This is a MUST read article on how predatory journals who only make money by charging authors are sidelining ethics and the usual standards of peer review in order to make a profit.
With the author as their only source of income this neccessarily influences their editorial policies. But many of these journals have been heralded as a new era of open-access in contrast to the subscription publications, painting companies as Elsevier as 'greedy' companies whose subscription fees constantly rise over time.
This article casts very interesting light on these open-access journals. It does state that not every open-access journal is neccessarily predatory, but the 'author-pays', online-only, model does inherently influence editorial policy in the opposite direction to that of a limited page, impact factor driven standard journal.
Let us know your views –
Have you ever paid significant amounts of money to get your paper published ?
Or are these journals the future and it is right that open-access means all papers are free to readers around the world ?
I paid 900 $ for a publication in a journal and I believe this is a big sum of money ..
This is unethical in my opinion ..science here would be compromised and publication will depend on how many dollars you are paying
I think paid journals and subscription fees should be cancelled.
Only fixed reasonable sum of money should be paid as publication fees ..