F1000Research, an open access publisher operating an innovative model of post-publication peer review, was yesterday embroiled in controversy as it emerged that their criteria for accepting manuscripts for submission are based partly on the status of the author or their research institution, rather than simply upon the quality of the science itself.Chealsye Bowley, OA advocate and scholarly communications librarian, revealed on Twitter that she had had a paper rejected by F1000Research. Apparent...

After funding over 400 Open Access publications during its first year of operation, the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot is now moving onto the pre-payment agreement implementation stage. OpenAIRE has recently signed agreements and deposited a pre-paid fund with a number of publishers – BioMed Central, BMJ, Copernicus and Wiley – in order to be able to fund eligible manuscripts upon acceptance. This means a much simpler workflow for authors, since no invoice will be required anymore to receive t...

The identification of Gold Open Access with the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) is a widespread misunderstanding that has often led this alternative route for OA implementation to be dismissed as commercial publisher-friendly and prone to double dipping. However, Gold OA means publishing in any Open Access journal, and it's a well-known fact that over two thirds of the OA journals hosted in the DOAJ charge no APCs to their authors.This is the reason why when discussing the way the f...