Jeffrey Beall, Bentham Open, The Charleston Advisor, July 2009; self-archived September 10, 2009. A review of OA publisher Bentham Open. Excerpt:
... The site is supported by fees charged to the author upon publication of an article, and the fees are high. ... The Bentham Open site makes no mention of [fee waiver/reduction in cases of financial need], but in response to an e-mail inquiry, a representative stated that authors from developing countries are granted a discount of 30 to 50 percent off the publication fee charges. ...
The site states that, “All submitted articles undergo a fast but rigorous peer-review procedure, followed by prompt submission of an article for publication.” However, the journals contain articles that take unpopular views on topics and were likely unacceptable in mainstream journals. An example is the article entitled, “Cosmological Constraints on Unifying Dark Fluid Models” that appears in The Open Astronomy Journal. The article offers the dark fluid model as an alternative to the widely-accepted theories establishing dark matter and dark energy in cosmology ...
Because the dark fluid theory is not accepted by mainstream cosmologists, it is likely that if this article were submitted to any mainstream journal it would be rejected, and the author sought to publish it here because of the less-rigorous or façade-like peer-review process. Alternatively, the author submitted the article to Bentham Open because he knew that merely by paying the fee he could get his work published. ... In many cases, Bentham Open journals publish articles that no legitimate peer-review journal would accept, and unconventional and nonconformist ideas are being presented in some of them as legitimate science. ...
Another example comes from The Open Chemical Physics Journal. In the article “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” the authors conclude that some of the dust found in the World Trade Center debris is unexploded bomb material. They lead the reader to conclude that planted explosives were the real source of the World Trade Center buildings’ collapse, and not the aircraft that struck them. This article has helped fuel 9/11 conspiracy theories. Thus, Bentham Open is a place for people to publish their theories, theses, and ideas that are out of the mainstream.
There is no journal impact factor data for these journals because the data takes three years to compile and all the journals Bentham Open offers are less than three years old. In response to an e-mail inquiry regarding rejection rates for Bentham Open journals, company representative Mehwish Akhter replied, “Rejection rate is different for different journals. Normally it’s 25–30%.”
The membership plan that Bentham Open Access offers is highly questionable, especially the individual membership. The cheapest individual membership is $1,600, and at this rate an author receives a 5 percent discount on author fees. For an article that costs $800 to publish, the discount is $40; to break even at that membership level, an author would need to publish 40 articles. Clearly, very little thought has been put into Bentham’s membership plan; it appears only to be a way to generate revenue for the company from the naive.
The Open Access model is a good one, for it makes research freely available to everyone. However, Bentham Open is exploiting the good will of those who established the Open Access model by twisting it and exploiting it for profit. Just because a journal is Open Access doesn’t make it legitimate or high quality. ...
Bentham Open’s emergence into scholarly publishing in 2007 has served mainly as a venue to publish research of questionable quality. The site has exploited the Open Access model for its own financial motives and flooded scholarly communication with a flurry of low quality and questionable research. By linking to sites such as Bentham Open, libraries are diluting scholarly research and making it more difficult for scholars to sort through the abundance of journal articles available. ...
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
