I'd ask them what the hell they were doing if they published in a low quality, predatory "journal". I think it's ethically wrong to lend credence to leeches.

I wouldn't do anything of the sort if they published on arxiv. We have a place to publish respectable work without fees and without peer-review. In some subfields of CS, we're also lucky enough to have high quality, open access venues without exorbitant fees (e.g., USENIX conferences). So pay-for-crap is not a necessary choice.

> I'd ask them what the hell they were doing if they published in a low quality, predatory "journal". I think it's ethically wrong to lend credence to leeches.

That's the whole point of this debate. All the paid access journals are leeches in one form or another.

No, many (if not most) academic fields have high-quality journals run by non-profit societies. In my field (geoscience) the best of these are trusted more than Nature and Science, which are higher impact even though it's common knowledge that there are more unreliable papers in the glamour journals, mostly because the editors optimize for impact instead of scientific solidity. The non-profit societies charge similar rates (a few hundred to a few thousand per article). The fees reflect outsourcing of web hosting, formatting (both LaTeX and Word are re-keyed to XML for many journals) and typesetting, as well as dead-tree publication costs which are actually common if rarely read.

Additionally, to get at your earlier question of evaluating a paper by its host journal: Because academics are strongly incentivized to publish in high-impact journals, if someone publishes in a crap journal it raises eyebrows, because the obvious question is 'why' and the obvious answer is 'because the authors didn't want rigorous review' or 'the work is of supreme unimportance'.

Furthermore, because of curation aside from peer review (editors weeding out solid but unimportant papers) the journal's brand makes a difference in how many people will actually see the paper. While many readers will come across papers either by specific searches in Google Scholar, or by going through the citations in a different paper, many of us still read the tables of contents of a few key journals every week or month to see what is being produced.

I'm a non-academic scientist (in the non-profit world currently) and though I will never face a promotion and tenure committee who really gets into impact factors etc., I still want my work to be as widely read as possible, so I push for the best journals that I can get in that still meet my criteria (non-profit societies that have open-access at least after a year embargo). Google Scholar also ranks papers by how highly cited they are, so there are still viral-type effects and getting eyeballs on a paper early greatly affects later discovery and engagement.

edit: I took 'paid-access' to mean 'pay to publish' which was the original thread's wording, and wrote based on that. Some of this reply still holds for 'pay to read' but not all.

I definitely meant pay-to-read.