The Guard Dog. Who Keeps Watch For Fraudulent And Predatory Open Access Journals?

Hontas Farmer | Science 2.0 | December 23, 2014

The advent of open access (OA) publishing has lead to a proliferation of journals which offer a peer reviewed publication venue for a nominal charge.  Some of these journals are associated with scholarly associations.  Such as Physical Review X.  Others are not, such as a journal I published in called the International Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics (SCRIP) or the journals published by Elsevier, and other such companies.

However, with author pays open access comes the danger that a journal will have a financial motive to publish whatever nonsense it receives without any pre or post publication review or comments.  As well as no protocol for making corrections or having conversations about a paper which can and in some cased has, ie. The Winnower and Science Open Research, taken the place of actual peer review.  Journals that don't have either organized post publication review or traditional pre publication review are not as reliable as those that do.  Responsible readers should never take the word of a published article in either format as sacrosanct weather it has the imprimatur of a large scholarly body or a small new publisher.   Some due and that is IMHO mentally lazy...