Department Policy Statement
FMCH Departmental Policy on Funding Open Access Journal Publication Fees
The department is interested in supporting wide dissemination of scholarship by faculty, residents, and medical students. Open Access (OA) Journals publish their articles and make them available freely online to all readers. To support this, OA Journals charge processing fees to the submitting author that can range from $500-$5200. As of February 2019, the number of open access, high-quality, peer-reviewed journals exceeded 12,000. There are several varieties of open access journals, including full open access journals with all content open access and hybrid open access journals where only some of the content is open access. Some open access journals, known as predatory journals, lack a rigorous peer review process, diminishing the overall quality of publishing. Other indications of predatory publishing include:
- Notifying academics of article fees only after papers are accepted.
- Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or serve on editorial boards.
- Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission.
- Appointing fake academics to editorial boards.
- Fake or non-existent impact factors.
With the current selection of higher quality professional open access publishers available, such as PLOS and BioMedCentral, there may be times when publication in an open access journal is warranted to provide immediate public dissemination of research. For information on specific journals, you can check: “Think, Check, Submit” at: thinkchecksubmit.org.
For more information: