DavidOpenAccess

The quality of open-access publications is controlled in the same manner as traditional journals. A journal's economic or access policy does not determine its peer review policy. Open Access journals use the same peer review procedures, quality, processes and systems as traditional journals. If traditional journals convert to Open Access, the quality of peer review doesn't change. The key variables in journal quality are the quality of authors, the quality of editors, and the quality of referees, all of which are independent of the journal's price or medium.

We're focusing on open-access for peer-reviewed literature. The goal is to remove access barriers, not changing the quality of research.

There is also a very weak correlation between high impact factor journals (all those studied are toll access journals) and retraction rate. Reference here

Of course, there are "predatory" publishers but do not publish with them. You can find advice on how to spot predatory publishers on our site here.

Edit: Added hyperlink.

Hey! Thanks for your question!

Just to add to Joe's reponse. We understand that researchers (or any users) may have concerns like yours and like Joe said you can maintain anonymity. You can use the Open Access Button and not use your real name as your username. In addition, you can use a unique username that is not used on any other sites or service and we blur location data to protect user's privacy.

There's been some great work done recently to estimate the revenue publishers get from Universities but as far as I know there's been no comparative research on the university vs. individual issue (it would be hard to measure).

With the Open Access Button, we get that initially it's unlikely to be a sure way of getting papers but in addition to the research we will be able to pick up via research repositories, we hope to facilitate an increase in the rates of self archiving research ("green open access") by contacting authors occasionally, providing data and explaining how researchers can self archive (thus making more research available).

Unfortunately the Open Access Button can only do so much, and isn't a perfect or long term solution to this problem. We will use the data and stories collected by the Button to help make the changes required to really solve this issue.

Thanks so much! Tweet us your blog when it's ready and we'll share it!

As long as we have a URL for the research paper, we should be able to scrape the metadata and then search for it or taking that paper and adding it to your wishlist.

We would really like to start to translate the Open Access Button into other languages. If you can lend your support that would be fantastic. You can email at comms[AT]openaccessbutton[DOT]org and someone will get back to you.

A Richard Stallman sized Duck!