Open access journals are useful for all researchers, because some them doesn't have access permission for other journals.....then every one can get the data....its very useful for their research work.

This is a very current and significant issue: consider that in some countries researcher supported by public funding should be made publicly available by law...

I recently published in a new online open access journal by SpringerOpen, it was a good experience and I'm confident that the paper will have the best possible availability to the readers. The editorial process was the same as for most non-open access journals. On the other hand, the journal is new and still not indexed... but it's not related to the fact that it's open access.

Springer has an option to grant an open access to various types of papers, from book chapters to journal papers, but it has additional and significant costs... Moreover, balancing some very important open access journal (I mainly think of PLOS ONE) there is a number of 'predatory' and not serious open access journals... Maybe you were already aware of it, but there is a directory of Open Access journals specifying some criteria for journal inclusion here: http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=news&nId=303

I think that Open Journals are VERY useful. I could find very good information and practical examples in these articles.

Unfortunately Open Access has a business model which is in short like this: you pay, I publish your article. There is no incentive to the publisher in selecting only good articles. On the other hand, traditional publishers want their journals to have the best contents, so that researchers worldwide will pester their libraries to have a subscription to their journals. So there is a quality requirement from the people paying.

Now, everyone want to increase their bibliometric scores and is going to Open Access to get their publications out fast (no questions asked). This is further aggravating the problem with the Open Access model.

I would suggest a visit to the great

http://scholarlyoa.com/

to get an idea on what is happening in the Open Access world.

And I really find this quote significant:

"Too many open-access commentators look only at the theory and ignore the practice," he said. "We must completely understand what we are giving up by abandoning the traditional scholarly publishers and adopting new models or, at our peril, we may not be able to go back."

(http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/420731.article)

Costantino, I agree that open access journals are not a silver bullet... but your description of the business model and behaviour of traditional publishers seems... a little simplistic, from my perspective. Think of Impact Factor manipulation, for instance...

Moreover, scientific conferences in many disciplines are essentially based on the principle "you pay and the paper is included in the proceedings"...

I agree Giuseppi, trad journals are not perfect either. I think a lot depends on the referees that volunteer their time and experience when reviewing submissions. You can get useless reviews from high impact journals, perhaps because there are too many submissions to them for the reviewer to put any time and effort into each paper, but very helpful reviews from OA journals. Because they are all peer reviewed journals it is up to the scientific community to understand their responsibility as reviewers in keeping up the quality of publications, while not unnecessarily preventing eventual publication - more emphasis could go into this topic in academic curricula. Perhaps more effort could go into regulating this area eg somehow demonstrating or registering the credentials of the reviewers (although this is no guarantee of a quality review) that the journals use or showing the rejection rate, etc

I've just encountered these online publishing enterprises, and don't know what to make of most of them. As a musician, it reminds of "Pay to Play " venues that want you to bring your own audience. Some sites charge over $1k (US)!

I did come across an interesting catalog effort by a researcher to qualify a directory of OA publishers and ended up with a list of questionable sites. Check it out...http://www.researchgate.net/go.Deref.html?url=http%3A%2F%2Fscholarlyoa.com%2F2012%2F11%2F30%2Fcriteria-for-determining-predatory-open-access-publishers-2nd-edition%2F

I have very good experiences with Frontiers journals. This publisher recently joined Nature Publishing Group, which has big prestige. Frontiers journals are highly citable (e.g. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience has the IF of 5.2, whereas last year it was not present on the Thompson list at all! They have some article types, for which the publishing fee is not required, e.g. Opinion Article. Another serious Open Access publisher is PLOS. I recommend the recent article: Desjardins-Proulx, P., E. P. White, J. J. Adamson, K. Ram, T. Poisot and D. Gravel (2013). "The Case for Open Preprints in Biology." PLoS Biol 11(5): e1001563. The authors recommend Open Preprints Publishing, which is usually free of charge (free at Rersearch Gate). This type of OA publishing allows an author having immediate publication, which increase its impact factor and establish precedence. However, there are many OA journals, which are just trying to get impact, so be wary!

Comment to Edwin Huff: it is not "Pay to Play," but rather "Pay to be cited."

I think they meet the simple requirement of science to be available for everyone and at any time. Nevertheless, the cost associated with publishing in open access is quite high compared to restricted ones. I also notice that some funding agencies require publishing in open access, so I beleive it is getting popular as well.

OA publishing is now a fact and it is not possible to go back to only the traditional publishing paradigm. As Amr says, it supports the dissemination of scientific knowledge and promotes access to research findings for all, However 'Beall's list' of potentially predatory publishers from the link provided by Edwin is quite astounding in number - over 400 publishers, many with multiple journals. However the criteria for not falling in this group are very stringent (it would be interesting to know whether any traditional publishers would also fail the criteria). The most important thing is to keep the quality of published science high, whether through traditional or OA publishing and I think this requires some form of regulation or objective rating system (eg such as Beall's list attempts to do) which needs to be supported by a scientific community association leader in the area (?such as US Academy of Sciences? or PubMed?).Just like we teach our kids about the risks of the internet, it also requires education of new scientific researchers in this new technology, both benefits and risks and how to weigh these up for the benefit of their future careers and science as part of their basic curriculum. The costs of OA publishing can be defrayed by factoring this in prospectively in grant applications, etc, just as we should now do for the cost of statistical consultation.

Well i agree with Susan. I think it is the future. Scientific knowledge should be open to the public. Also open access journals stop the annoying thing with intellectual property rights in traditional journals, where you pay and you have no IP rights on your publication. What is more popular traditional journal have transferred the rights of figures, tables, etc to companies which sell them and if you want to use a figure even for educational purposes you may pay up to 250$.

I have recently came across a publication promoting preprint servers, which I recommend for reading by anybody interested in increasing impact of his/her work:

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001563

Preprint servers are widely used by mathematicians, but are not popular in researchers working in Life Sciences. The authors say that free preprint server is offered by ResearchGate.

Always a popular subject now-a-day. I agree that disseminating knowledge is a responsibility that we have towards our eco-system. Therefore, what we write should be up to the level and the scientific community will either accept or reject the written article. Since we worry about our scientific integrity, it becomes our own responsibility to control what we submit to either medium.

Just to be more specific and clear about impact factor manipulation and the not always morally irreproachable behaviour of Journal editors (traditional and open access) you can find here a recent news on Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/brazilian-citation-scheme-outed-1.13604?goback=.gde_4040884_member_269225591#!

I run an open access site for workshop proceedings (ceur-ws.org) since 1995. The service is used to a large degree by workshop organizers from the semantic web field, but a couple of interesting IS workshops are there as well The quality is indeed varying and we are far from receiving the blessings of an impact factor. But the reputation is building up in the community. The workshop organizers put effort in a proper reviewing process. Workshops are for discussing early ideas, so I believe that open access is a good thing here. There are also workshops that are highly competitive. These are typically organized and attended groups of researchers that want to establish a new field.

The real archive of science is still in the journals.

Thank you Guiseppe for the article.

You're welcome!

Science staffer stings OA! Was he fair? Fake article submitted, and got accepted at 170+ OA journals out of 300+ submissions...

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=229103215&m=229103192

This could also happen in well established journals. Check the case of the IEEE acceptance of papers in their conferences. The story is online.

Or check the case of D. Stapel who produced a series of papers in high-ranking journals based on fabricated results.

I personally consider publishing on journals a very old (but still necessary) way of getting reputation and then rewards in terms of career advancements. Open or not open. Why not sharing everything on the web, building up our research together, without any Intellectual Property protection, just having in mind one aim: scientific and technological progress. Still utopic nowadays?

I fully support your Mind-Set Francesco. This is what I am trying to follow.

Cheers

Open access journals is becoming the most appropriate medium in availing research data, and infact, in my opinion it is the best medium for upcoming researchers to showcase their research.

Open journals are very good for us: free, good quality, easy to access, fresh information. Probably the future of open (global) research...

We define open access journals as journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access.

Advantages and disadvantages of open access journals are the subjects of much discussion amongst scholars and publishers. Reactions of existing publishers to open access journal publishing have ranged from moving with enthusiasm to a new open access business model, to experiments with providing as much free or open access as possible, to active lobbying against open access proposals. There are many new publishers starting up as open access publishers, with the Public Library of Science being the best-known example.

A few obvious advantages of open access journals include the free access to scientific papers regardless of affiliation with a subscribing library, lower costs for research in academia and industry, in addition to improved access for the general public and higher citation rates for the author. However, a recent study concluded that overall citation rates for a time period of 2 years (2010/11) were 30% higher for subscription journals. After controlling for discipline, age of the journal and the location of the publisher, the differences largely disappeared in most subcategories except for journals that had been launched prior to 1996.

The main argument against open access journals is the possible damage to the peer review system, diminishing the overall quality of scientific journal publishing. For example in 2009, a hoax paper generated by a computer program was accepted for publication by a major publisher under the author-pays-for-publication model. In 2013 some accepted a fake medical paper authored by an editor of Science, although this experiment was criticised for having a flawed methodology and lack of a control group.Many newer open access journals also lack the reputation of their subscription counterparts, which have been in business for decades.[citation needed] This effect has been diminishing though since 2001, reflecting the emergence of high quality professional open access publishers such as PLoS and BioMedCentral.[citation needed]

Many opponents of the open access model continue to assert that the pay-for-access model is necessary to ensure that the publishers are adequately compensated for their work. Scholarly journal publishers that support pay-for-access claim that the "gatekeeper" role they play, maintaining a scholarly reputation, arranging for peer review, and editing and indexing articles, require economic resources that are not supplied under an open access model. Opponents claim that open access is not necessary to ensure fair access for developing nations; differential pricing, or financial aid from developed countries or institutions can make access to proprietary journals affordable. Some critics also point out the lack of funding for author fees.

The potential damage to the peer-review system is real. I saw a publication in an open-access journal that is to about 50% a summary of an old paper. It even copies the figures. It gives references and is kind of a "state-of-the-art" survey. However, the authors obviously built their survey on very few papers that are also rather outdated. I had the impression that the open-access journal that they published with was interested in geeting some money from the authors and that the authors were interested in a rather easy journal publication. Almost all editors/reviewers of the journal were from a single country. It gives this impression...

This is a very interesting article, from Science, documenting the predatory nature of many open-access journals and publishers: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

Here is a comment I recently heard from a famous professor/editor on this subject:

"The ongoing disruption to the traditional scientific publishing industry and business model is creating turmoil and ambiguity in which predatory open access journals and publishers can thrive. Ultimately, there is likely to be a new dominant design for scientific publishing that provides open access to new knowledge while preserving and enhancing processes of peer review, replicability, and other safeguards to ensure that what is "published" is also reliable. In the mean time, be careful and avoid what may look like a quick and easy way to get your work published."

Hopefully this new dominant design is not built around the specific circles of power existing in many reputable journals and reviews. Look Mohammad, since there is a "person or human" involved in the process, there is "ego". To what extent is the reviewer or editor away from such self-centric behavior is random!!

I hope you never face such a problem.

The above argument does not support haphazard behavior of some open access journals. I guess we should be very selective.

I believe these are needed. They provide a great way for new researchers to get into the business of publishing and learning more about what it takes to get into this area of research.

Mohammad, wasn't your long post copied from Wikipedia?

Then indeed citation is needed....

OA gives researchers from low-income countries the opportunity to have access to all the research that is vital to their own research, and get a better understanding of the current trends. Hence, i think OA has to be encouraged.