ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF RESEARCH: THE OPEN ACCESS CHALLENGE — Doctoral Education Bulletin, No. 8 Winter 2016 Special Edition

"Academics interested in the potential benefits of publishing their research in Open Access (OA) journals are often confronted with many challenges. For example, they regularly receive spam emails from 'predatory' journals pretending to be serious scholarly outlets, and promising immediate publication against the payment of fee. Due to the rapid emergence of such 'predatory' publishers in recent years, together with their bad press, the essentially healthy phenomenon of OA has undeservedly acquired a slightly tainted image. In this article, I try to give a short overview of what Open Access publishing is all about and conclude by providing advice to early-stage researchers navigating between its benefits and challenges"