Too much of a good thing?

Following an open access theme, a statement from three national Academies makes interesting reading. Opening with the sentence: Researchers are increasingly overwhelmed by the growth of the number of publications that they have less time to read; the Academies note the proliferation of “pseudo-journals” creating a damage to the scientific community with the demand for low quality articles (or even worse, for falsified or plagiarized manuscripts). The Academies set out four fundamental principles in order to earn the label of “scientific journal”.