Publishing associations join forces to combat illegitimate open access journals | Inside Higher Ed

"In response to the uptick in journals with questionable editorial practices that have followed in the wake of the open-access movement, several publishing associations are banding together over a new set of principles to tell the legitimate journals from the crowd. The Committee on Publication Ethics, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association and the World Association of Medical Editors on Thursday announced the 'Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.' The 16-point document, described as a work in progress, covers everything from the necessity of using peer review to dictating where information about copyright and licensing information is displayed to publishing schedules and marketing practices. The open-access movement has generated much excitement from scholars who view the editorial processes of traditional journals as barriers to publication for researchers, especially if their work doesn't fit neatly into the scholarly visions of mainstream journals. But starting an online open-access journal is quite easy if one doesn't care about quality, and many that have appeared can hardly be described as 'scholarly.' Some of those journals were recently exposed by John Bohannon, a Harvard University biologist and writer, who submitted a fabricated article written by an imaginary scholar to 304 open-access journals. More than half accepted the article for publication, many with little or no signs of peer review ..."