Search http://doaj.org/ and narrow your search with 'no charge'.

As I said in the many other threads dealing with OA: beware of predatory publishers as they are extensively listed by Jeffrey Beall here

http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/12/06/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2013/

Hi, more than 100 questions with the topic of "open access journals" was asked before.

For example:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Should_open_access_publications_be_encouraged

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_submitting_a_paper_for_open_access_journal_a_good_idea11

Cheers, Nadine

Hi Rafael,

A good question - but not an easy one to answer. I review, or am on the boards, for over 30 international peer-reviewed journals. Most are established publishing house journals - but a handful are open access. Of those handful that are open access, the quality is variable - as probably are their commercial motivations - but a few are obviously trying their best to 'enter the market' and compete.

Personally - I have no problems submitting to open access journals that have a clear justification in the market I.e recognized editor, editorial board, current and future strategy to improve, open and transparent processes - and don't appear to 'be in it just for the money'. With the 'fake ones', these processes will either not be in place - or appear to be 'made up'.

Of course, there are plenty of 'established' traditional journals that appear credible on the surface - but are equally dubious. That's also part of the 'homework' that authors need to do before submitting to any journal.

Follow the poll about the submission of articles to open access journals

http://howtopublishinjournals.com/2013/08/19/poll-the-current-use-of-open-access-journals/

Yes @ Nadine A. Gund, a lot of times this question has been already asked.

Isn't it a goal of science? To reach as many people with knowledge as possible? Open access journals give you a chance to show your results to literally everyone. I'm sorry, but with current prices on the publication markets, I am not paying 30-40 dollars per article just because I think the article is interesting. I can't afford that. Open access is a way for people to be up-to-date with current state of science.

What with those, who have very interesting research results but no money for publishing? What about young researchers, phd students, who often have an amazing ideas, amazing experiments, but they can't afford publishing it?

Ok, i understand the idea behind fee-based journals. You have people who review the articles, etc. But this system does not work if a. you wait up to 2-3 years for publishing your article after submitting it, b. the single article then costs over 30 dollars to have 24hour access to it. And best proof - if world's best scientific libraries can't afford buying top journals, then who are they for?

Some publishers went a step ahead - they offer free access to scientists, based on the recorded IDs. This is a good system, cause let's face it - we don't publish the articles for ourselves, we publish them for other scientists to read? At least that's what I think.

Search http://doaj.org/ and narrow your search with 'no charge'.

As I said in the many other threads dealing with OA: beware of predatory publishers as they are extensively listed by Jeffrey Beall here

http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/12/06/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2013/

I avoid 'vanity publishing' journals (those that charge authors and publish whatever is sent to them to earn more money). Recently one of such journals asked me if I would be interested in becoming a reviewer... already in the short abstract I saw 3 typos and, of course, I refused to read such an article. I prefer journals indexed in Web of Science, Scopus etc.

I see many of us treat OA journals as journals that charge for publication and are OA. Please note that there are very many OA journal that DO NOT CHARGE FOR PUBLICATION (actually, MOST OA does not charge)!

Please, don't think of OA journals that way. I know why so many of us do - because there are predatory journals (see Michael Brückner's note above), and these are indeed a problem in science communication. There are also very good (high-impact) OA journals which charge a lot of money - since they are so prominent, we know them and we see the huge fee. All this makes us think that most OA journals charge for publication. But let me stress once more: there are so many OA journals that do not charge their authors!

Science and education publishing group is offering publication for free till this September 30: Any one interested can submit for peer review during this period to avail the offer

@Marcin Kozak and @Michael Bruckner, You are right! Following the link http://www.doaj.org/ , anyone can check whatever being said about OA Journals!

Regards,

Ljubomir Jacic

I've started a poll a few week ago on this issue at the link below, you can see the results and participate. I will analize later the findings and results.

http://howtopublishinjournals.com/2013/08/19/poll-the-current-use-of-open-access-journals/

Thanks for studying this issue.

In some disciplines like linguistics, OA journals are the obvious solution, because they are free for authors and readers. However, their number tends to diminish, because maintenance has a cost and brave webmasters get overworked. In computational linguistics, some associations turned to OA, but the problem is not settled yet. Favored outlets (with fame, impact factor and the like) are not free, and the pression to publish via those outlets is enormous.

Tiia, in some cases paying to be published is not merely 'vanity' but a means not to get fired by frantic administrators who never thought about the number of issues of excellent journals in a year, the number of papers in an issue, and the number of researchers on the planet, let alone the number of days in a year!

I am worried about Open Access journals because many of them target people in poorer economies who cannot afford subscriptions. If they were all high qulaity, it would be OK. But read this: Bohannon, J (2013). Who’s Afraid of Peer Review? Science 342, 60-65 (4 October 2013). A spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals.

I am also worried about the future of our key journals so, on ResearchGate, I have decided not to make my PDFs available until a year after publication (some of my co-authors will be faster on their own pages). For book chapters or conference proceedings, where I don't have PDFs, I have decided to supply a PDF 'preprint' that will be a fair approximation of the published work. I therefore still provide access to people from universities that cannot afford books and journals.

the OA issue is different from the performance of journals. OA should never be thought as a compromise of quality

I think most of you will enjoy this article (I loved the little video!):

http://theconversation.com/riled-up-by-elseviers-take-downs-time-to-embrace-open-access-21405

So, will Elsevier force us to take our PDFs off ResearchGate? If so, I will be happy to provide "preprints".

Yes, there are trustworthy and good open access journals. One simple indicator (necessary but not sufficient, of course) is that the better ones have no author fees. Here's an example in my field (math) of an open-access, high-quality math journal SIGMA which is FREE for authors, i.e., there are no publication charges at all, is indexed in Web of Science and Scopus with an impact factor of 1.243: http://www.sigma-journal.com/

I am now not submitting to established journals, journals with extensive indexing, journals that charge huge publication charges, journals that take a long time to review and later publish.

I am now submitting my valuable articles to open access journals, journals that consider waiver requests, those with faster review process and less time to publication online after acceptance.

Please go through this link

http://www.sciepub.com/

I have now contributed more than 5 papers to this publisher.

Every opinion given here might be true or false, it depends on the editors and editorial board of the particular Open Access journal.

Since I am editor of an open access journal, I can tell you my experiences.

Our journal (Eur. Chem. Bull.) works with very low level of fees (100 EUR/paper) and from time to time give free (zero cost) or discount (50%) publication possibility for every author to give chance for publication of the researchers of poorer countries. All of our papers are reviewed and do not have to pay fee after the rejected papers.

Ca. 20-25 % of the apeprs sent to us had to reject, ca. 70 % had to sent back to revise.

It is possible to ask personal waiving of cost, if somebody has no grant to pay it or if the author works in a developing countries.

It means, nobody is disclosed from the publication if his work is valuable.

Nobody can publish at us if the work has no scientific content, because we reject the paper evenif it causes a small monetary loss,. But, publishing invaluable work would lead to disappearing the value of journal and disappearing the serious and well trained authors. Some journals do not follow these viewpoints, but these journals have been disappeared/will be disappered soon, evenif new and new ones started with similar predatory policy.

What I wanted to show with my opinion is, that everything depends on the decision of people who do the journal and authros, whether they want to publish a good journal or anywhere where his work can be seen in printed form.

I would completely agree with László Kótai

WE must support OA journal that charge only nominal fee in my opinion anything less than 200 USD is OK for authors in developing nations who are supported with funds by institute/university.

I personally believe that Publishers should consider complete waiver depending on the inability to pay to encourage authors from developing nations Especially countries like India

Responding to László Kótai: if all OA journals follow the example of yours, we will have no problems. Unfortunately, the OA world is currently plagued by less meticulous and honest publishers. I hope that you are correct and that, with time, the bad ones will disappear. However, it is not expensive to introduce a new OA journal, as we can evidence from the recent proliferation of journals, all soliciting papers. I receive requests every week from journals that I have never heard of.

Dear Martin,

Accepting the reality of your opinion, I hope the time will solve the problems you mentioned. Similarly to you, everybody is given request to send papers in every week, however, it is your and our decision - after checking the papers presented in these journals, the editorial board members, etc - that we are sending papers to these or not. If you take into consideration the viewpoints of the other side, they have to reach the authros in some way - and this is the easier.

At the moment of starting a journal it is hard enough to decide whether that journal will be a correct journal or not, what will be the policy. However, reading the available information and checking the scientific power of the editors, editorial board members can give some chance to decide whether it is worth working with that journal or not.

Lack of information have to suggest rejecting.

There are around 60 scientific search engines which lists both open access and closed access journals.It is very easy to find out the fake and true journals through these search engines.. If you need the list pls feel free to contact me on RG

Dear friends,

I might have responded late but i certainly believe that the list of predatory publishers needs a serious re-consideration. many quality publishers like HABERT are included.

I believe the list mostly includes those that charge huge publication charges. But many publishers i have found in that list waive/discount in cases who cannot afford

Like Ramana said, my comment may be late but nonetheless may not be useless. As a victim of predatory open access journals, I will advice any serious researcher to be careful in choosing where to publish. Many OA journals are set up without editorial board (though many list names of academics on their web without the knowledge of such people). Before you submit any work, check different sources to be sure you are not going to regret afterwards. OA is very good but it appears it is beginning to be abused by swindlers.

I wonder what "open access" will mean when these bad journals disappear. "No access"? I suppose we can all try to publish our papers again somewhere else ...

Hello Graeme,

Do you think they will ever disappear? I don't think it may be possible soon. These journals are set up to satisfy authors mainly from developing countries who may not know the difference between good and bad journals. In the country where I came from, what counts is the number of publications and not the impact/quality. Therefore, many researchers careless about the fee. All they need is to pay and publish fast and once a journal has ''international'' attached to its name, they assume it is a quality journal. Similar thing happens in other developing countries and such will perpetuate these journals.

I do submit many- but mostly after confirming its indexing and perspectives, seeing availability of doi/xml and particularly about Thomson Reuters listing, and much more

Dear Rafael, This is matter because even to publish in an open access we need to be cautious whether it is reliable or not. Anyhow open access journal is an alternative for publication with wider accessibility.

We do submit but after confirming its indexing.

Do avoid OA publishers which use some of the following fake metrics bought from such companies!!!  New Fake Metric Company Sells Nine Bogus Metrics to Publishers:

"...According to the service’s “Contact” page, it’s based in Pune, Maharashtra, India and operated by Mr. P.R. Choubey, M.Tech, Electrical Power System....

In my opinion, any journal that showcases one or more of Mr. Choubey’s bogus “factors” is a journal that researchers should avoid.

Many open-access journals, especially those based in South Asia, now use fake metrics to attract article submissions and the money that follows.

Don’t submit your work to any journal that advertises a fake impact factor or any other made-up metric."

http://scholarlyoa.com/2015/09/17/new-fake-metric-company-sells-nine-bogus-metrics-to-publishers/

I prefer open access journals if they have no or low article processing charges. Most importantly, I will check the indexing and abstracting of the journals too. There are several very good open access journals which are free to authors in my research area.

I agree entirely with Prof. Ferreira

Yes, sure, 

I submit sometimes there articles, even more, I am a Chief-Editor of some open access journal...

http://www.hrpub.org/journals/jour_editorialboard.php?id=84

Regards!

In my opinion the OA concept and practice is a bit fuzzy , everyone in printing science  is trying to grab a pie of the popularity and need of OA , however the mechanisms are yet very diverse, unclear and quite dis-aggregated and some players are doing better that the other in the space that lacks monitoring  and guiding policies. In some cases you have to buy the privilege while other may be genuinely trying to popularize and disseminate knowledge.

Are you submitting your articles to open access journals?

No, because I do not need to. I am slightly older, so that I published enough, and I am not obliged to publish any more. However, publishing industry has become a rather ruthless business. Most scientists must publish; publishing industry knows this, and asks them to pay for this. This is a vicious circuit, and I do not see any way out of it.

What disturbs me (slightly) is that a publisher charges 40 dollars for a downloading of my paper (which has some 400 downloads), but gives nothing to me. It is not that I want to get rich, but this is not fair towards the (potential) readers. In my humble opinion, 4 dollars per download would be enough.

It all depends on the publishers and editors, how they handle the OA journals. If they are practicing the same review process for OA, I do not see any problem with OA too. However, unfortunately, most of the completely OA journals do not do this.

I believe the open access is a legitimate revolution hijacked by some illegitimate players posing as publishers and consider OA journal publication system as a business earning money

I submitted a paper in OA but charges me $900 in handling fee.  This journal has an IF of only 1.2 but indexed in Google scholar.  In another OA journal it charges only $70 which I paid but regreted later because unlike in the other journal, my paper did not go through a scholarly reviewing process and was not even checked for typographical errors.  This experience gives me a second thought in submitting in an OA journals..

Are you submitting your articles to open access journals?

I do submit my articles to open access journals.  To me as novice researcher in academic field,  I need to take 2 steps approach: First, submit to open access journals to have a feel on article writing, gain wider readership because readers access these journals for free and gain more citations.  Hope this can motivate me to improve my researching skill, writing skill and publish in more traditional journals which have very stringent requirements. 

Still using closed access, but pretty intrigued by journals like RIO.

Anyway, I do think that the key question here is rather: how to prevent the peer-review process from facing complete meltdown (both in CA and OA)?

Agree with Prof. Manuel

While I agree that OA journals have their horror stories, one should not discount them overly. In the same pace one cannot ignore the nuisance values that some journals having ISSN numbers carry. 

I want to urge all stakeholders to imbibe sincerity in everything  we embarked upon.

you can publish your paper free of charge in JACET at the following link: JACET is a scientific research journal that aims to disseminate achievements in original research in the field of Computer Engineering and Technology.http://jacet.srbiau.ac.ir/