http://www.openaccess.manchester.ac.uk/checkjournal/predatoryjournals/
There is a growing debate on charges made by Journals before articles are published. While some believe that paying for an article to be published cast a slur on the Journal/publishing house others thinks it is only means by which the concept of open access can thrive. Some are quick to brand these journals as predatory whiles others think otherwise.
There are two ways that journals can make money, they can charge for editing, or they can sell subscriptions. How much money they demand determines if they are predatory or not. These days everyone has a word processor, they are available for free for most computers, and organizations like libre-office are distributing them for free. It depends on what type of editing is being done, and whether the charge is exorbitant for the editing being done, how much the author should pay in the way of article processing fees. In essence, if the author guidelines have you format the article in the proper manner, the main editing needing to be done, is shifting between formats for how many columns the journal is printed in. This is set up costs for the paper journal, the electronic journal may just need formatting to put the water marks in place.
New journals like PEERJ have moved to a lifetime fee structure where you can simply pay once and publish for life. for $99.00 you can publish an article once a year. This pays the up front cost of the equipment needed to edit the journal without becoming exorbitant.
To compare against a top flight journal such as Elseveirs journals, where subscription sales are allowed free, but open access costs literally thousands of dollars, you can see that article processing fee's are a punishment against those who insist on Open Access (for policy reasons) One can see that this might be a predatory stance. On the other hand, Elsevier still publishes a paper journal as well as the electronic version, and printing costs have to be absorbed in some manner.
PeerJ has done away with the paper journal altogether, so they don't have printing costs to worry about. Everything is done in recycleable electrons.
Charging a fee by itself does not make a journal predatory, depending on how large the fee is.
The question of being predatory is more the product of falsifying peer review and/or accepting too low a standard of quality. I depend on the site linked below to help me identify quality journals.
http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/01/02/list-of-predatory-publishers-2014/
It is something important which needs to be discussed at length. I personally believe a journal should not charge fee if it is securing copyright of the articles from the author.
Otherwise fee should be within a limit to make publishing journal a meaningful academic activity and not mere a business.
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