Open Access Journals certainly aren't all bad

"An article in Science caused a bit of a stir last week when it demonstrated that many open access journals had published, or committed to publishing, various permutation on a highly dubious research paper created to deliberately test the review process used by open access journals.   Language Log have a good discussion, and link to many other responses to the article. I thought I’d share my specific experience with open access journals in linguistics. I’ve published in Language Documentation and Conservation and am working through reviewer comments for a paper in Himalayan Linguistics. Both are digital open access journals and my experience in both cases was highly positive. There are a few differences between ‘hard’ sciences and linguistics when it comes to publications. The first is that turn around on a linguistics paper is generally anywhere from 4-18 months. This isn’t such a problem as work doesn’t ‘date’ as quickly as it does in areas such as physics. I still regularly return to the data and discussion in papers from the 1980s and 1990s and still find it incredibly useful. We don’t tend to publish small increments in knowledge, I know I prefer to save that for conferences. This, with the fact that we also don’t tend to have as densely-multiauthered means that the output for a linguist doesn’t tend to be as high in other disciplines. The next different is that there are very few linguistics open access publications that work on a ‘pay to publish’ model. Instead they are funded by the generous donation of time and skills by academics in the area, and their home institutions. As mentioned in the Linguist List discussion, the pay-to-publish model doesn’t really cover costs, and academics do much of the work for free anyway even for really expensive reader-pays titles. Now that a competent student RA can format papers using InDesign, and maintain a journal’s WordPress page, open access journals can be just as professional as any of the bigger players, often while attracting readers and authors from a wider pool.  I am, of course, only talking about relatively small journals from small academic communities; I know of all of the people on the editorial boards, and have met many of them. I certainly think it’s worth having discussions about the limitations of open access models - but it’s also worth pointing out cases where they work really well!"