Pseudo-academia rises in wake of open access

New York Times : The open access movement has been pushing for scientific publishers to move away from subscription-based systems for access to academic papers. One side effect of the movement is the rise of journals that give the appearance of being legitimate but lack peer review and use shady business practices. This can range from hiding fees from submitting authors to using names of researchers as supporters without permission. And many of the publications have titles that are very similar to well-known journals. The lack of peer review and the willingness to publish anything if the author pays the fee results in the mixing of legitimate research with pseudoscience. This gives pseudoscience the patina of legitimacy, which is damaging when nonexperts are attempting to research a topic. When researchers apply to submit a paper, they are often uninformed of the cost of publication, and then are held liable for exorbitant costs when their papers are accepted. Employers who are looking at resumes can not necessarily distinguish legitimate publications from the mimics. Some people in academia are attempting to catalog the pseudo-journals and their pseudo-conference brethren, but the growth in such entities may be too much to track or limit.