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Publishing in Scientific Journals

COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories; http://www.coar-
repositories.org/).
Harvesters collect metadata made available through e-print servers
(repositories) and hence make the contents of such repositories available
worldwide. Note that most repositories have no, or only minimal, quality
control. Yet, as documents in repositories are made available to anyone,
anyone may read, interpret, discuss, and criticize their content. When
documents are made public once they are finished they do not suffer
reviewing delays.
If an article has been accepted for publication then one may replace
the original version (the unreviewed manuscript) with the version
accepted for publication. Most large publishers agree to this, sometimes
after an embargo period of (at most) 1 year. Only when a submission is
accepted one may speak of Green OA. Before that the manuscript has no
authority whatsoever and could as well be placed on a scientist’s personal
webpage. Note that this does not mean that there do not exist extremely
important and valuable manuscripts that have never been formally pub-
lished. The most famous case probably being Perelman’s proof of the
Poincare ´ conjecture (only placed at the arXiv), which earned him
the Fields medal and the one-million-dollar Millennium Prize, which,
by the way, he both turned down.
The best known and probably largest list of OA journals is available at
the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a website maintained by
the Infrastructure Services for Open Access.

3.2.5 Predatory Journals
The phenomenon of OA has given rise to so-called predatory journals
and publishers. These are author-pays, open-access journals for which
there is no or only a veneer of peer review. Such journals do not show
author fees prominently on their websites or in e-mails that they send to
authors soliciting manuscript submissions. Predatory publishers and jour-
nals only want to make a profit, by collecting APCs and have little con-
cern for scientific integrity. The best-known watchdog on predatory
publishers was Jeffrey Beall, who from 2008 till early 2017 compiled a
list, known as Beall’s list of potential, possible, or probable predatory
open-access publishers and scholarly journals (Butler, 2013). Yet, not
everyone agreed with Beall’s methods and some journals have, after
appeal, been removed from the list. Indeed, one may say that there is a