Why I refuse to review papers submitted to "gold" open-access and hybrid journals?
When I am sollicited to review a paper submitted to a
gold open-access journal
(i.e., with a publication fee),
I refuse to act as a reviewer because I don't agree with this publication
mechanism. In particular I refused to review papers submitted to:
- The Scientific World Journal (Hindawi Publishing Corporation).
I also refuse to review papers submitted to hybrid open-access journals
(some commercial publishers say supports open-access),
because institutions
pay twice for such journals: once for being able to get a copy of
papers submitted and/or published through the classical way, and another time
when submitted papers through the open-access way.
Hybrid journals for which I refused to act as a referee are:
- ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software.
- Acta Arithmetica.
- Applied Mathematics and Computation (Elsevier).
- Discrete Mathematics (Elsevier).
- Experimental Mathematics (Taylor & Francis).
- IEEE Transactions on Computers (IEEE).
- IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing,
- IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (IEEE).
- IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (IEEE).
- IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems (IEEE).
- Information Processing Letters (Elsevier).
- International Journal of Computer Mathematics (Taylor & Francis).
- Journal of Algebra and Its Applications (WorldScientific).
- Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A (Elsevier).
- Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics (Elsevier).
- Journal of Computer Languages (Elsevier).
- Journal of Discrete Algorithms (Elsevier).
- Numerical Algorithms (Springer).
- Rendiconti del Circolo Matematico di Palermo Series 2 (Springer).
Some links:
Note: my article Division-Free Binary-to-Decimal Conversion with
Cyril Bouvier was submitted (as a regular paper) to IEEE Transactions on
Computers before I learned this journal had moved to the hybrid submission
system. Otherwise, I would have submitted this work elsewhere.