The Scientist has an interesting piece worth a read. The state:
While poor quality publishers are proliferating, often creating hundreds
of cookie-cutter journals, they tend to publish relatively few
articles. On the other hand, PLoS recently published its 50,000th article. We reanalyzed data from a study we recently published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
that characterized the APCs of journals charging them. We found that
two thirds of the approximately 106,000 articles published in 2010 in
these journals, listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, were in
publications listed by the 2010 Journal Citation Report (JCR) and
another 11 percent were listed in the Scopus abstract and citation
database but not in the JCR. The publishers of these indexes screen the
journals they list for quality including ensuring that they are properly
peer-reviewed. This suggests that the majority of scientists publishing
in OA journals that charge APCs are savvy enough to avoid low quality
publishers. It appears that they care about the quality of the journals
in which they publish, as do the promotion and tenure committees that
evaluate researchers. Beall and others have pointed out a legitimate
concern with predatory publishing, but it is important to keep that
concern in perspective.
I suspect Journals like PLoS will become accepted on a par with those which charge extreme amounts per article. I personally use PLoS and have subscriptions to some old standards, NEJM, Science, etc, but PLoS and other on line available sources exceed now by orders of magnitude my subscription access.
I believe this will change the velocity of dissemination and will be a tremendous benefit to science.
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