ChemInformer Chemistry Information from Rutgers University Libraries

As a follow-up to my last post, I thought I would share with you a list/website compiled by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver. The site is known as Beall’s List: http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ and contains lists with links to publishers and individual journals considered predatory. While publishing in a respected and well known open access journal, like PLoS One, is a great thing to do, it can be easy to be fooled by new publishers offering open access for your article. These publishers are unreputable, and after accepting your article, will solicit publishing fees. If you ever have any doubts about a journal or publisher, please don’t hesitate to contact me, and remember to check Beall’s list.

and how you can avoid them”

This is the title of a blog post by ImpactStory, impactstory.org, and it discusses what are essentially three myths about publishing in an open access, online only journal. I know that the chemistry community generally has been slow to accept the open access movement, but with ACS jumping on the bandwagon, it’s time we all took note. The post is well worth the read, so I am posting a few snippets here. For the full post, see http://blog.impactstory.org/the-3-dangers-of-publishing-in-megajournals-and-how-you-can-avoid-them/

• Megajournals publish prestigious science: top scientists, including Nobelists, publish there. They also serve as their editors and advisory board members.
• Megajournals boost citation and readership impact: A 2008 BMJ study showed that “full text downloads were 89% higher, PDF downloads 42% higher, and unique visitors 23% higher for open access articles than for subscription access articles.”
• Megajournals promote real-world use: The most famous example is of Jack Andraka, a teenager who devised a test for pancreatic cancer using information found in Open Access medical literature.
• Megajournals publish fast: Rather than having to prove to your reviewers the significance of your findings, you just have to prove that the underlying science is sound. That leaves you with more time to do other research.
• Megajournals save money: Megajournals also often cheaper to publish in, due to economies of scale. PeerJ claims that their even cheaper prices–$299 flat rate for as many articles as you want to publish, ever–have saved academia over $1 million to date.

Other myths debunked: ‘No one in my field will see my article’, and ‘It will look like I couldn’t get published in a good journal’. See http://blog.impactstory.org/the-3-dangers-of-publishing-in-megajournals-and-how-you-can-avoid-them/ to find out the facts.