Spam journals or open journals?
A company called Bentham Open has launched a massive number of new journals in just about every field. Open journals are cool and can be of high quality as the Journal of Machine Learning Research has shown. But what about Bentham?
They charge you $800 to publish a paper. That is an acceptable fee for researchers with grants.
Montreal, Canada 
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this part is my favourite:
“Indexed in
Google, Google Scholar”
Comment by innar — 6/3/2008 @ 16:22
If it is started from a commercial company, and the objective is to make money, I did not see the necessary causal link between a commercial model to a high quality journal, open or non-open. I think the open journal has to learn the model of open sources to build up the quality.
Comment by yuhong yan — 6/3/2008 @ 19:29
We recently got a warning about another bunch of new on-line journals who are apparently recruiting for their editorial board: Scientific Journals International.
Don’t know if they are related, or more sign of a budding trend of open access journals with sometimes questionable standards.
Comment by Cyril — 10/3/2008 @ 11:33
See my blog entry (http://gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com/2008/03/black-sheep-among-open-access-journals.html) on the illegal practices of Bentham – I’ve now received over a dozen bulk emails from them “asking” me to submit my work to them. They need to be taught a lesson in ethical behavior…
Comment by Gunther Eysenbach — 25/3/2008 @ 14:28
To me, the number of OA journals launched by Bentham and their spam advertisement do no leave a good impression. Listing in Google and Google scholar is not of much relevance, one would need to check ISI (needed to get an impact factor) and Pubmed (MEDLINE). I have not bothered to check their 200+ journals but the few I checked are not listed anywhere. OA publishing is a way of earning money, too.
My favorite OA publisher is BMC with reputable journals, impact factor of several over 4 and quite some over 3.
Journals published by scientific societies are another excellent option (usually OA after 6 or 12 months).
Petr Karlovsky
Comment by Petr Karlovsky — 2/4/2008 @ 8:01