Scholarly Publishing Free for All

Scholarly open-access publishing has helped make research free for all. That is, there are no price barriers to research published using the open-access model—anyone can access and read it. Unfortunately, this model has been poorly implemented, and it has become a publishing free-for-all, meaning that it has become disorderly, prone to scams, and full of research misconduct (Mudgal and Unnikrishnan, 2013). This article highlights the positive and negative aspects of scholarly open access publishing, focusing on open-access publishing scams and how to avoid them.