Identifying quality in scholarly publishing: Not a black and white issue

One of the motivations for OASPA was to help newer open access publishing initiatives and to keep standards high, but also for organisations to help one another and share experience. Like every industry, publishing is open to scamming and deceptive behaviour in many forms and there are various influencing factors at play – including the pressure to publish that academics face. An abundance of unfamiliar new publications makes it difficult to know which can be trusted and the merits of blacklisting or whitelisting publishers are being widely discussed.