It would however be useful for the whole research community to have some kind of Open Access journal directory (including hybrid journals mentioned by Michael Pfeil) where some kind of quality assessment could be provided and where these predatory practices could be tracked via social networking tools. Many researchers, particularly in developing countries, lack the appropriate advice as to ascertain whether a given open access publisher is a reliable one.

Open access is good if they won't charge publication fee.

I think there are other posts similar to this topic..as mentioned in that nature article, there are many fake journals with which one has to be careful while submitting the articles..I would suggest that spend sometime to know about the journal, its history, the reputation of the publisher and editorial board members before you consider submitting your article for open-access journals..if the journal satisfies the above criteria then you can submit..i think there are lot of benefits with the open-access journals which cannot be overlooked..

Open access or not is not really the issue, even established journals offer to publish accepted articles with open access [not surprisingly for an often considerable fee]. Instead the reputation of the journal, as well as the fit between article topic and journal focus, determine where I will publish.

It would however be useful for the whole research community to have some kind of Open Access journal directory (including hybrid journals mentioned by Michael Pfeil) where some kind of quality assessment could be provided and where these predatory practices could be tracked via social networking tools. Many researchers, particularly in developing countries, lack the appropriate advice as to ascertain whether a given open access publisher is a reliable one.

Yes Pablo is correct in his viewpoint. Just scientific knowledge researchers should be vigilant and literate about the journals and their authenticity. Unfortunately, there lacks a forum or stage where such issues can be discussed or debated and make others aware of the reality.

I think this is the way research results should be disclosed. We are moving very fast in this direction, but as mentioned by Nalam, one should choose journals with good reputaion. There are many good open journals already available for chemists. One problem I see is that some open journals are now been transformed in big business charging a lot of money if the paper is accepted.

Open journals are good if they are not including fee to publish your articles, but sometimes, unpaid open journals are just too slow and take more than a year just to get your article(s) published. The quality of unpaid open journals is better than paid journals

Open access journals involve money making but in a different way... If you have to pay why not to main stream journals and make your paper accessible to all... It will do your purpose also while publishing in widely accepted journals with good impact factor...

But there are paid journals have no impact factor

There is a debate between open-access journals and traditional publishing. These fly-by-night open access journals as indicated by this Nature article do hurt honest researchers trying to get their research published. On the other hand, there is more pressure from public funding agencies to have results published as open-access since the research was funded with public dollars. To minimize the damage of these predatory publishers, there needs to be a push from government agencies to pressure traditional publishers to provide open-access to publicly funded research without forcing the researchers to pay for exorbitant fees (>$1,000). While these publishers have legitimate costs, researchers are providing a great service to the industry by providing the source material (manuscripts) and editing service (peer-review process) for free. Agreements at the federal level with publishers (both traditional and open access) to provide discounted open access fees for research funded by government agencies should be a priority. With the decrease in open access fees paid for by the research scientists, these predatory publishers will have less incentive to operate as their revenue streams will dry up when research publications moves back to quality journals (both traditional and open access).

The 2012 edition of the Beill's list of predatory Open Access publishers as put together by Jeffrey Beall, Librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, is available at: http://metadata.posterous.com/tag/predatoryopenaccessjournals%29. As one could expect, there is some controversy about it (read the interview with Ahmed Hindawi, founder of Hindawi Publishing Corporation for more info about it in Richard Poynder's "The OA Interviews" series at http://poynder.blogspot.fi/2012/09/the-oa-interviews-ahmed-hindawi-founder.html) but it is the one available predatory OA publisher collection of its kind and should be reasonably useful when trying to find out more info about a given publisher we may have doubts upon.

I wish I could upvote Pablo's comment several times. This kind of list is very much needed. FYI, he also has a facebook page that has closer to real-time updates on specific journals/publishers.

IT is fine, but if they dont take processing fee:)