The push to implement Open Access (OA) as the new standard for academic research dissemination is creating very real pressures on academic journals. In Canada, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) recently adopted a policy requiring that journals applying for its Aid to Scholarly Journals (ASJ) grant make their scholarly content freely accessible after no more than a 12-month delay. For journals such as the Canadian Journal of Political Science (CJPS) that not only publish high-quality, peer-reviewed articles to a specialized audience but also support the work of scholarly associations through the revenues they generate, the push to move to OA comes with a number of challenges. The Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) and the Société québécoise de science politique (SQSP) established a committee to chart the best course of action for the CJPS in light of this changing landscape. This article summarizes the key findings of the committee and underscores some of the challenges of OA for journals with a profile similar to the CJPS, as well as for the broader research ecosystem that they support.

We question whether blacklists are the best answer to the serious problem of predatory journals. In conjunction with the worrying recent rise in the number of predatory journals, a remarkable number of blacklists have been compiled for specific scientific fields. However, predatory journals are continuously changing names and publishers; they are set up to make easy money and buried shortly after. Predatory journals have such a rapidly evolving nature that it is hard to keep track of them and keep blacklists up to date. We therefore propose a focus on ‘whitelists’ and directories of virtuous journals rather than on blacklists of pseudo-journals. We suggest that a set of criteria be determined that journals have to meet to be qualify as legitimate. In addition, the scientific community should come up with strategies to close the established biomedical databases to predatory journals, thus preventing them from achieving global exposure.

Most researchers today are bombarded with spam email solicitations from questionable scholarly publishers. These emails solicit article manuscripts, editorial board service, and even ad hoc peer reviews. These “predatory” publishers exploit the scholarly publishing process, patterning themselves after legitimate scholarly publishers yet performing little or no peer review and quickly accepting submitted manuscripts and collecting fees from submitting authors. These counterfeit publishers and journals have published much junk science? especially in the field of cosmology? threatening the integrity of the academic record. This paper examines the current state of predatory publishing and advises researchers how to navigate scholarly publishing to best avoid predatory publishers and other scholarly publishing-related perils.