With open-access journals, articles and other content are freely available on the Internet. This is in contrast to journals such as Nurse Educator in which individuals or libraries need a subscription to the journal or to pay a 1-time fee for access to an article. Open-access publishing removes these restrictions and makes articles available online to everyone. Some scholarly and professional journals are exclusively open access, and other journals offer both traditional and open-access options.1 There are several open-access models, often referred to as gold, platinum, and green. In the gold open-access model, authors are charged a fee for processing the article when it is accepted for publication. Those fees can range from US $200 to more than $3000.2 In platinum open-access, the publisher, typically a nonprofit organization, covers the costs for publishing the paper. In green open-access, a preprint of the manuscript (the final word version) is placed in an open-access repository.2 Some subscription journals offer a hybrid model, in which authors are given the option of paying a fee for their article to also be open access. Do not confuse open access with publish ahead of print. Nurse Educator, for example, publishes accepted articles ahead of print so they can be available to readers, with a subscription to the journal or willingness to pay the fee for an article, as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, the open-access movement has led to an astonishing growth of predatory journals. You may be receiving e-mails asking you to submit your manuscript to some of these new open-access journals, many of which are not reputable and are predatory journals. A quick way to identify a predatory publisher or journal is by going to Beall's Scholarly Open Access (http://scholarlyoa.com) Web site to check if the open-access journal you are considering is on 1 of the lists. Read the Guest Editorial by Nolfi, Lockhart, and Myers in this issue to understand the current situation with predatory publishing and to avoid submitting a manuscript to 1 of those journals.3 Refer to published guidelines for evaluating the integrity of journals1 and selecting quality journals.4 This is important for your career and for maintaining the quality of the nursing education literature.

Submitted by: Marilyn H. Oermann, PhD, RN, ANEF, FAAN, Editor-in-Chief,mailto:[email protected].

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