Disseminating Knowledge: From Potential to Reality—New Open-Access Journals Collide With Convention

Scholars beware! For years, researchers have lamented the long lag times endemic in conventional academic publishing, where even the highest quality papers have often taken more than 2 years from initial submission to publication. Luckily, advances in digital technologies and the advent of online, open-access (OA) journals are rendering such delays obsolete. Society can now directly benefit from published research within months (and sometimes weeks) of a study being completed. Unfortunately, however, open-access, online technologies are interacting with new revenue-generating business models and historic assessment systems, leading to the rise of predatory open-access (POA) journals that prioritize profit over the integrity of academic scholarship. Such interaction is leading to disruptive distortions that are systematically undermining academia’s ability to disseminate the highest quality scholarship and to benefit from free, timely access.