Publication of Scientific Journals

Recently I cooperated in a research project about Open Access Journals. I used N6 software to analyse comments of about 1000 authors from different countries about open access and scientific publication. By reading the answers of the authors to an open question I learned many points that I didn’t know about scholarly journals. I never even imagined that scientific journals may charge authors for publishing their articles. But in fact some journals do this especially in medical sciences. Many journals charge for article submission (e.g. Journal of the Investment Management charges 100$), many journals charge the authors if their articles have colour pictures (e.g. European Journal of Neuroscience charges 450£ per colour page), some journals charge submission fee if the article is submitted in manuscript (not electronic format).

In the traditional business model of scholarly journal publication, there is a publisher (private or public) that invests and publishes journals and then by selling the journals to readers makes benefit. In fact readers traditionally pay for the journals. But now some other business models are being implemented. One of them is Open Access (OA). In open access publishing, journals are published on the Internet and access is free for all. But, who pays for the expenditure of publication? Authors are expected to pay for publication of their articles (I should point out here that there different definitions for Open Access. I am talking just about one of the approaches to OA).There are many doubts and questions about this publication model. For instance many scientists believe that this may deteriorate the quality of the articles and also leads in biased publications as just those authors can publish who have money. Indeed the quality of articles may be compromised. If you are interested to know more about Open Access take a look at this collaborative weblog which is one the best source for information about OA. Also if you need the list of Open Access journals you can refer to the directory of them.