Home » Harrit et al. Publish in Peer-reviewed Journal: Active Thermitic Material in WTC Dust

casseia's picture

The "vanity press" canard

Submitted by casseia on Sun, 2009-04-05 18:59.

Steven Jones says, at 911blahgger.com:

Note that page charges for scientific journals are very common these days -- the new-jerk comments I'm hearing that this is some kind of "vanity press" are totally wrong. Page charges for scientific papers are typically paid by the university of the first or second author, and this is the case for this paper.

The major difference apparent to me is that ANYONE can access this material free of charge online. This is in marked contrast to the model of academic journal publishing in which institutions pay a whopping subscription fee either to receive a hard-copy version of a journal and/or so their members can have online access to the material. If you aren't part of subscribing institution, sometimes you can buy a particular article for a good chunk of change.

The open access model generates revenue from the writers instead of the readers. So the real question has to be about the peer review process. You can poke around the Bentham Open site for information about this.

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