Re: Does Dramatic Growth of DOAJ Signal Success or Market Dysfunction?

[Stevan Harnad <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 11:24 PM, Sandy Thatcher (sandy.thatcher
alumni.princeton.edu)wrote in liblicense:

> But we all know (without mentioning names) that there are some
> companies out there taking advantage of the low barriers to entry
> in OA journal publishing to operate scam operations that are set
> up to take from unwary authors. I wonder how many of these
> journals are counted in the DOAJ total? Does DOAJ attempt to
> verify whether a journal really is a legitimate operation?

Which is one of the many reasons why authors are just spinning 
their wheels on the slow, narrow, costly and uncertain road to 
(gold) OA publishing -- instead of going full speed ahead on the 
wide-open (and free) road to (green) OA self-archiving.

See this growth chart for the next decade from the world's 
biggest and most successful gold OA (and hybrid gold) OA 
publisher (data are for all Thompson-Reuters ISI-indexed 
articles, not just Springer; re-used with permission):

http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/springergoldgrowth.png

Cf: http://bit.ly/EOSmandateGrowth

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed 
to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. 
Logos: The Journal of the Publishing World (forthcoming)
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21818/