A Map for the Maze of Open-Access Publishing - Al-Fanar Media

Some readers may be familiar with the recent debate on open-access publishing, the movement to provide free public access to scholarly research via the Internet. Some may have heard that Science magazine published some research that claimed to prove the low quality of open access journals, because a large proportion of them accepted a severely flawed paper for publication. In reality, as many have commented in a Guardian blog, the research proved no such thing, primarily (and paradoxically) because the study was not conducted in an experimentally sound manner. At the very least, there was no control experiment to test if the hoax research would be accepted for publication by closed-access journals.