‘Let [Malaysian ] authors decide on journals to publish in’ / Frontiers

"As an open access publisher, Frontiers welcomes this debate about the best use of public resources to support research publishing, offering Malaysian science quality, impact and fairer value propositions...

Malaysian researchers, institutions, and the government need to make careful choices about how to spend limited funds and avoid low-quality or fraudulent journals... the reasons behind the current choice of journals to fund or not fund could be concerns about high fees, quality or issues raised in other countries. These are the right factors to consider; but the new policy is a sweeping reaction to recent trends in scientific publishing. We fear that the policy has not been adequately informed, and its implementation holds negative consequences for the Malaysian research community. The new policy is in effect a blanket ban on commercial publishers that provide exclusively open-access services [...]"