Open-Access Journals

Use the link to access the full text article published in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health available from Sage. "New open-access journals are appearing at a rapid rate. Some may be motivated by an opportunity to make a profit by preying on inexperienced authors. Cries of protest from authors wedded to traditional journals have been voiced. Charges of fake peer review and sloppy editing have some foundation in some of these journals. 'Paying to publish' smacks of cheating to those who worked their way up via the traditional route. After all, in the field of book publishing, weak writers with healthy bank accounts have always been able to find publishers who would print their books. By demanding that publishing should be 'free,' they impart a gloss of high-minded morality over subscription-based journals. These concerns are valid. Some open-access journals are of poor quality. Perhaps some will print anything for the right price and call it peer reviewed. However, there is another side of the story ... The growth of open-access journals has been accompanied by financial problems and quality issues. University budgets should be reworked to assure that author processing fees are included. Authors must learn to evaluate the quality of the journals to which they might submit their manuscripts. Promotion committees should revise their criteria so that the quality of the candidates’ scholarly contribution is considered, regardless of where it appeared; publishing in open-access journals can be accounted as nontraditional scholarship in some cases but in other cases it is fully as meritorious as some of what appears in subscription journals. Finally, the unfortunate truth remains that open-access processing fees remain out of the financial reach of many scholar-practitioners. We can hope that competition among these journals will bring down the prices, further democratizing of production of knowledge ..."