New OA Journals – real and unreal

New open access journals are born frequently. Some of these journals are quite real and useful while others are not. The bad ones prey on unknowing faculty and researchers, and their practices have given good OA journals a bad reputation. In any wild frontier, lawlessness is pretty much certain. Because of the confusing lay of the OA landscape out in its own wild frontier, there is quite a bit of education that needs to take place for those inhabiting the badlands. We must make it our business to include, as part of any OA action, an education program that explains what OA is, how it works, what the roles of the various players are (researchers, publishers, librarians, etc.), and what being a good citizen means in this OA frontier. It pays to check out the journal on both the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org), and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (www.oaspa.org) before you submit an article.

Two brand new OA Journals:

New GHSP Journal Pushes the Open Access Envelope | K4Health.

6 reasons to publish with peerj.

Read about predatory OA publishing in this Nature Article from March 27, 2013 (this includes tips on how to figure out if an OA journal is reputable):

Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing.