Many scientists and publishers have questioned the quality of open-access (OA) journals. Initially their concerns may have been justified, as most of the original OA journals were created and operated by academics with little experience in publishing and often very limited resources. While some of these early experiments in open-access publishing resulted in excellent journals, many did not and often disappeared quickly. Unfortunately this attrition gave OA publishing a bad reputation.
Since the launching of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and BioMed Central (BMC) about a decade ago as the first professional OA publishers, the reputation of OA publishing has begun to change. Our study, which was recently published in BMC Medicine, confirms what many have suspected for quite some time—that the better OA journals are on par with their subscription counterparts.
We compared approximately 600 OA journals with 7,500 subscription journals using Web of Science citation data. (Full ...
