The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is the most important directory of Open Access journals. In July 2013, it had indexed nearly 10,000 OA journals and over 1,100,000 OA articles, overall. Some journals use a Creative Commons licence. This makes it easier for researchers to use the documents.

Open J-Gate is another repository with articles from 3000+ Open Access journals. It was developed by Informatics India Ltd. and was launched in 2006. Options are available to browse the list of journal titles or run a search on the various fields pertaining to an article (title, keywords, authors, abstract, affiliations) and then access the full text.

BioMed Central (BMC): BioMed Central is an independent publisher in the fields of biology and medicine. It provides open and free access to 257 validated journals (data of July 2013) that are published according to a special business model: the publication fees are borne by the authors or by the institution to which they belong. 

Public Library of Sciences (PLOS): PLOS is an active OA player that was launched in 2001 by the National Library of Medicine. The aim was to put pressure on commercial publishers and force them to accept the free online publication of an article six months after it had been published in a journal. The launching did not have the desired effect, so PLOS began creating new OA journals. It now publishes seven hard science journals including PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine.

SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a scholarly web platform that supports research in Latin America. It brings together several South-American and European organisations and promotes collaboration and sharing within the international scientific community. It provides access to a collection of journals and freestanding articles. Communications are mostly available in Spanish and the portal also has both a Portuguese and an English interface.

Source de l'image : http://www.lib.sfu.ca/node/12169

The rise of OA publishing has led to the creation of many publishing companies that are attempting to gain a foothold in the new market without offering the necessary guarantees to claim to play a true scientific role: the peer-reviewing process is reduced to a minimum or may not even exist, and reviewers may not have the required expertise. Contracts with authors are often fallacious. However, these publishing companies still charge APCs to the institutions of researchers who choose to work with them.

It is standard practice for these companies to flatter authors or boast about extravagant bibliometric indicators. Furhermore, the promise of a rapid peer-reviewing process can be tempting when such a process can take up to 6 months with other publishers.

Predatory publishers exist in various parts of the world (the data varies depending on whether you consider the geolocation of their IP address or the registration link for their domain name), but they are mostly found in countries such as India, Egypt and the USA.

Jeffrey Beall is a librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver. He maintains a list that is contested by some publishers but that provides a wealth of information on the most active predatory publishers on the market. This list motivates Open Access publishers to show greater transparency as regards how they operate and their article reviewing procedure in particular.

In this presentation, Jeffrey Beall sets out the criteria for identifying OA publishers that might be suspected of being predatory publishers: