I have blogged before about how low-quality open access “publishers” indiscriminately spam researchers for manuscripts for the most ridiculous journals and “edited books” (here, here and here). The peer-review and quality-control appears to be minimal and the publication fees are outrageously high.
Now The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about how ‘Predatory’ Online Journals Lure Scholars Who Are Eager to Publish. It is excellent and very important this is brought to attention. There is of course nothing wrong with a desire to communicate research in the form of open access articles. However, having tax-funded researchers paying ridiculously high fees for someone essentially hosting PDF files without any real peer-review whatsoever is a huge waste of tax money. Even worse, having researchers passing these “publications” off as properly peer-reviewed scholarly articles is essentially a form of academic misconduct in my view.
[…] I have previously written about how some open access publishers spam researchers for submissions and demand high fees to publish papers and book chapters (here, here, here and here). […]