Reputable Open Access Journals should meet the following standards:  

• Provide unfettered (freely accessible) access to all peer-reviewed articles.
• Be a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association OR adhere to its Code of Conduct.
• Offer a standard article fee schedule for public view.
• Have a policy to waive fees in cases of economic hardship.
• The journal should be indexed in a major indexing and abstracting service such as Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed and others.   You can confirm the locations where a journal is indexed by consulting with Ulrich's Periodicals Directory.  Call up or email your UIC Library Liaison if you aren’t sure how to check these details.
• Most open access journals allow the author to retain their copyright.
• If a journal you are considering publishing in is sending up red flags by not meeting these standards, it might be better to consider another place to publish your article.
• You may also want to check and see if the journal is listed on Beall’s List of Potential, possible or probable predatory open-access publishers.  If the journal is listed, it may be sign that you should looked for another publication venue.   Beall provides his own criteria for Determining Predatory Open Access Publishers.

http://researchguides.uic.edu/c.php?g=252603&p=1684024

P.S. @ Dietrich Rordorf, I modified my post above. Thank you. 

My opinion is that regardless of the business model, journal reputation is most important. If it has a high impact factor and is on the elite/excellent listings for universities, then it's a good journal.

The open access journals can get from my perspective, a more positive contribution in sharing knowledge in that aggregation more researchers and research papers.

Anja, thank you! I totally agree whit your approach! Unfortunately there are some of those who assesses the work, and they see things without shades, in black and white only!

Hi,

There several kinds of open access journals, some of them more reliable than others. Early research on open access journals suggested that the papers published in this kind of literature is cited more than papers published  in the subscription journals. However, to these days researchers consider only few open access journals as reliable, and most of the researchers in the academia still prefer to publish their papers in the traditional subscription journals.

In addition to previous comments on impact factors, one can also check th impact factors of open access journals (for example on http://library.tue.nl/catalog/OAImpact.csp).The impact currently most difficult to measure is for green open access (publications deposited on institutional repositories which have not been published elsewhere). I

Hi,

Most OA journals ask for publication fees, and this is one consideration that should be taken into account when publishing a scientific paper. Personally, I feel uncomfortable  with such payment, although the OA editors justify this fees as "processing fees".

Good discussion.  There are many high quality open access journals.  In some fields many of the top journals are open access.   Open access gets wider visability for scholarship, and fair access for those who can not pay subscriptions (developing countries as example).   Author fees can be a legitimate alternative way of paying the costs of journal publication.  But there are poor quality predetory open access journals, to watch out for.  Publishers do sometimes use author fees as a way of getting extra money.  University libraries which mostly pay journal subscriptions are working to prevent journal publishers from getting paid twice for hybrid journals.  We all need to be pushing publishers for  

Open access is a very important advance for scholarship.  I hope that we will address the problems with it, rather than shying away, and sticking with ,often overprices, restricted access subscription only publishing.

Hi,

Beware of journals that do not advertise processing fees on their front page, and if one is lucky enough he could find this information hidden in the last section of the "submission" link.

1) We can check an OA journal to see if it is covered by legitimate indexing services. 

Björk  & Solomon (2012) concluded that OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine.

Björk, B. C., & Solomon, D. (2012). Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact. BMC medicine, 10(1), 1.

http://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-10-73

2) to avoid predatory journals, we can refer to Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2016

https://scholarlyoa.com/2016/01/05/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2016/

http://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-10-73

https://scholarlyoa.com/2016/01/05/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2016/

Reputable Open Access Journals should meet the following standards:  

• Provide unfettered (freely accessible) access to all peer-reviewed articles.
• Be a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association OR adhere to its Code of Conduct.
• Offer a standard article fee schedule for public view.
• Have a policy to waive fees in cases of economic hardship.
• The journal should be indexed in a major indexing and abstracting service such as Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed and others.   You can confirm the locations where a journal is indexed by consulting with Ulrich's Periodicals Directory.  Call up or email your UIC Library Liaison if you aren’t sure how to check these details.
• Most open access journals allow the author to retain their copyright.
• If a journal you are considering publishing in is sending up red flags by not meeting these standards, it might be better to consider another place to publish your article.
• You may also want to check and see if the journal is listed on Beall’s List of Potential, possible or probable predatory open-access publishers.  If the journal is listed, it may be sign that you should looked for another publication venue.   Beall provides his own criteria for Determining Predatory Open Access Publishers.

http://researchguides.uic.edu/c.php?g=252603&p=1684024

P.S. @ Dietrich Rordorf, I modified my post above. Thank you. 

Bradford's law of 1934 demonstrates that publications in a specific research area are spread across three groups of journals - a small one which attracts most high quality publications, a bigger one which attracts another cohort of high quality submissions, and a largest group whcih also has high quality publications but there are mixed with lower quality ones. Open access journals are late-comers and are still fighting for their space and reputation with journals which are established. They would have the same odds to gain popularity as with traditional journals in new areas where journals are created in the same time. In a recent blog I looked at funding for gold OA - and in step 1 I mentioned several tools which help to select journals (OA and non-OA) - see on http://openscience.com/open-access-funding-guide-for-researchers/, hope this helps. 

Hi Milena,

Tthanks for answer! I consider it useful and clarifies some aspects of the topic!

Hi,

I agree with Dobreva's description on the present status of OA journals, I would like, though, to give an alternative explanation on the Bradford distribution; The Bradford distribution divides the journals into three zones with similar number of papers, that are spread in different number of journals. In the core of the distribution one can find few quality journals that publish papers that are concerned with the main issues of the specialism. In the second zone there are more journals that publish papers that are concerned with the specialism but also a mix of other subject areas, and the third zone is the peripheral area of the specialism in which papers are spread in many more journals and  the specialism is mentioned only occasionally. This distribution is described in the following formula:1:n:n².