Open-Access Journals: Is anything accepted?

     Week 10's readings have been about open-access publishing. One example of this purportedly sustainable practice is to charge authors article fees. BioMed Central, which was specifically mentioned in this week's article by Roy Rosenzweig, "Should Historical Scholarship Be Free," currently charges as much as $2815  its article-processing charge to be published in Genome Biology. Of course, there are a few fee waivers and discounts available, if you live in a low-income country, suffer from a financial hardship, or work for/study at a Member of BioMed Central institution. For those of us affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we can save 15% on getting published by BioMed Central. For more information about BioMed Central's publishing fees, click here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/faq/charges. 
     Last fall, National Public Radio ran a story about potential shortcomings of this open-access movement. "Some Online Journals Will Publish Fake Science, For A Fee" discusses how John Bohannon, a contributor at the journal Science, sent articles with fake research to over 300 open-access journals. 61% of the open-access journals accepted Bohannon's article for publication. To read the article, click here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/10/03/228859954/some-online-journals-will-publish-fake-science-for-a-fee.

Citations:

Knox, Richard. "Some Online Journals Will Publish Fake Science, For a Fee." NPR.org. 3 October 2013. Web. 24 March 2014.

"What does it cost to publish in a BioMed Central journal?" BioMedCentral.com. Web. 24 March 2014.