Some Research Wants to Be Free, Some Follows the Money: Bogus Journals Complicate the Open Access Movement

A glut of junk open access journals, pandering to desperate authors driven by the “publish or perish” mantra, is staining the reputation of that new model in scientific and scholarly publishing.Despite the appeal of Stewart Brand's rallying cry “information wants to be free,”1 the ambiguities of that key term free have long fostered confusion. Does information gravitate toward freedom in the sense of free beer or a free lunch, raising the obvious objection that there is no such thing? The costs of generating and distributing information must be recovered somewhere. Or does freedom in the sense of free speech, unfettered by official censorship, steep access costs, or other artificial constraints, better suit the purposes of scientific communication?