EDITOR'S COMMENT Science in transition: open access to society?

# The Author(s) 2013. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com In general, the current article-refereeing mechanism depends on trust in both the integrity of submissions and in peer reviewers. Nowadays, that trust is being tested by a disturbing change in scientific communication: open access. Unlike traditional journals, which rely largely on subscription reve-nue, many open-access publications earn their money through publication fees from authors. Profit is linked to volume, seemingly unlimited on the Internet. Although the open-access world includes many high-standard journals, abuse is prevalent, as an investigation by the journal Science recently established [1, 2]. To that purpose, Science journalist John Bohannon submitted fake papers with unmistakable scientific flaws to 304 open-access journals. It turned out that 157 of the journals had accepted the paper and 98 had rejected the paper