I believe that open access journals have a big roles in development of knowledge and promoting the research fields. They provide free access of articles for researchers, in particular, this method help the poor researchers and institutions. In other words, it provides an equal opportunity of research for all humans in the world.
PLOS (Public Library of Science) ONE is a famous open access online journal in different fields. PLOS ONE publishes papers in all areas of engineering, science and medicine. PLOS is a nonprofit organization that published the first journal titled “PLOS Biology” in Oct. 2003. After that, this organization added more journals to its database from other research fields. In a short term, it found its important role in publishing new and peer-review papers. Its headquarters was established in San Francisco, CA. It has an editorial office in the UK as well.
Its scopes include: publishing primary research even with negative results. Now, it publishes the papers in all fields and interdisciplinary fields. It considers the following papers as well:
- Systematic reviews
- Qualitative research
- Studies reporting negative results
- Describing software, databases, or other tools
This journal is an open access publisher. The cost of publishing a paper is 1495$. The authors must accept its policy. Based on this policy, the reuse of paper is legal without any permission and fees. This journal has a high impact factor. The five year impact factor for this online journal is 3.7.
PLOS ONE is certainly a model for high-quality open access journals. The biggest issue I see with the increase in Open Access journals is the massive increase in predatory journals which have arisen. I get several emails a week soliciting publications in these bogus journals. To me, this is frightening as it increases the risk for misinformation to be spread. I would prefer to see efforts made to help reputable journals become more Open Access, rather than the creation of these new, low-quality, scam journals.
Thanks Tanya for your message. I agree. Some of these journals publish a low quality level of papers and they do this to receive more money. Unfortunately, some open access journals do the business instead of scientific activities.