We are bombarded with numerous emails daily requesting to submit a paper, become a member of the editorial board, or attend a meeting. It implies that there should be a defect in the publishing business model that allows predatory journals to creep in and outnumber legitimate ones. Conventionally, the cost of publishing was covered by subscription (subscription-based). Budapest Open Access Initiative was the first to declare open access to scholarly published articles in 2002, followed by the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in 2003. The author-payer model is now called gold open access, in which the author is charged when the paper is accepted for publication.

Scientific papers accepted for publication in scholarly journals are subject to peer review. Manuscripts are usually reviewed by a minimum of two reviewers selected from a reviewer database or the suggested reviewers by the authors according to specific expertise and editorial choice. The reviewers are encouraged to complete the review within three weeks by sending reminders frequently. The reviewers assess the paper’s suitability for publication against defined criteria. The reviewer is looking for a paper written with clarity in good English. It should be original and the conclusions supported by robust statistics and ethically sound data. The article should present a coherent story. The paper must fit the aims and scope of the journal. The journal’s Editor will make the decision based upon the reviewer’s comments and will forward it to the Editor-in-Chief. The journal’s Editor-in-Chief will make the final decision regarding publication. Some consideration may be made to the article’s potential contribution to the impact factor and whether the paper is likely to be cited and downloaded. Journal may request a minor or major revision before final consideration to accept or reject. Authors must review and respond to the recommendations made by the reviewers and the journal’s Editor before resubmitting the article.

We agree with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) that authorship should reflect all 4 of the following criteria: • “Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work” AND • “Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content” AND • “Final approval of the version to be published” AND • “Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. (http://www.icmje.org). Listed authors are held responsible for their contributions to the paper and must sign the Copyright Assignment Form.

Free access to the articles is becoming more popular since it gives thousands of researchers access to millions of publications resulting in higher visibility and receiving much more citations, which often times might be the ultimate goal. For this reason, authors may seek a way to make the papers easily accessible to other researchers via uploading the full text to their personal website and/or scientific social networks such as the ResearchGate, which is legally considered a personal website of the users. This looks simple and naïve, but on the other hand it seems to be in contrast to the policy of the subscription-based journals, which may violate the granted signed copyright to the publisher. There are two concerns with letting others access the article for free: 1) A friend or a colleague may request the paper and the author is going to send the article via email. 2) The author uploads the full text on to a personal or scientific website available to every researcher. Regarding the first issue, do not hesitate to do so. It is accepted ethically and legally to send a requested paper to a researcher who is asking for it. As far as there is no commercial advantage by having the paper, any scientific use is encouraged and permitted. The second concern is currently a hot topic. On the bright side, providing free access to every paper might endanger the monetary benefits of the publishers. However, on the flip side of the coin, publishers are also gaining greater income, although indirect but significant via receiving more visibility and subsequent citations to the exposed papers. Having said that, to create a balance between the appeals for free access while avoiding the breach to the copyright system, publishers have come up with new policies in this regard, which is different from the Copyright without violating the subscription-based journals. The publisher copyright policies for self-archiving is called SHERPA/RoMEO. Within this, the copyright agreement policies and the retained author rights are obviated. SHERPA established in the UK universities as the SHERPA project to support open access institutional repositories, which further grew and is now comprised of fairly all research institutions as the partners. SHERPA is involved in full or advisory partner of some projects including the SHERPA/RoMEO. Self-archiving permissions vary between publishers and journals. Details about publisher and journal can be found onhttp://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/. For most of the journals and publishers, ResearchGate pages are linked to the correct publisher condition and can be seen by clicking ‘show self-archiving restrictions’. Permission is classified using colors: green means you can generally upload a full-text, blue or yellow means you should check your individual article conditions, and white means self-archiving is generally not permitted. It is the author’s responsibility to check for the RoMEO color and make sure he/she is not breaching the copyright conditions. However, do not forget that in case you are not permitted to post the full text to public, you are always allowed to send the article in a private message to another researcher or colleague.