braries using this service can “track” these Open Access journals and receive the records for uploading into their catalogs. Also, Bentham Open journals are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, and articles from some of the medical journals in the collection are mirrored on the PubMed Central site. The indexing, the Open Access directory listing, the MARC records, and the journal tracking afford- ed Bentham Open’s journals all function as essentially free advertis- ing for the Bentham Science Publishers company, the publisher of the Bentham Open journals.

SEARChINg

The site has given very little thought or effort to making its content easily findable. Bentham Open offers an A to Z list of all the 236 jour- nals it offers. Users do a lot of mouse clicking––up to six clicks––to get from the A to Z list to the PDF file that contains the article they seek.

The site offers a simple search box to search its article content, and the box is created using Google Custom search. Bentham Open offers no advanced search. Some, but not all, of the content is indexed in Google and Google Scholar, so users may find it easier to search there than on the site itself.

Critical Evaluation

The site states that, “All submitted articles undergo a fast but rigorous peer-review procedure, followed by prompt submission of an article for publication.” However, the journals contain articles that take un- popular views on topics and were likely unacceptable in mainstream journals. An example is the article entitled, “Cosmological Con- straints on Unifying Dark Fluid Models”1 that appears in The Open Astronomy Journal. The article offers the dark fluid model as an al- ternative to the widely-accepted theories establishing dark matter and dark energy in cosmology; it states:

In the standard model of cosmology, dark matter and dark en- ergy are presently the two main contributors to the total energy in the Universe. However, these two dark components are still of unknown nature, and many alternative explanations are pos- sible. We consider here the so-called unifying dark fluid mod- els, which replace dark energy and dark matter by a unique dark fluid with specific properties.

Because the dark fluid theory is not accepted by mainstream cosmol- ogists, it is likely that if this article were submitted to any mainstream journal it would be rejected, and the author sought to publish it here because of the less-rigorous or façade-like peer-review process. Alter- natively, the author submitted the article to Bentham Open because he knew that merely by paying the fee he could get his work published. Alternative ideas in science can have value, but journal editors need to make a distinction between alternative viewpoints worthy and not worthy of publication, and publishers must not abandon legitimate peer-review just to achieve the goal of making research Open Access. In many cases, Bentham Open journals publish articles that no legiti- mate peer-review journal would accept, and unconventional and non- conformist ideas are being presented in some of them as legitimate science. A site such as Bentham Open that offers a large number of titles can encounter a problem: if one of the titles earns a reputation for low quality, it sullies the reputation of all the other titles in the collection.

Another example comes from The Open Chemical Physics Journal. In the article “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from