Abstract
Open Access to research outputs has significantly changed the world of scientific publishing. As opposed to the original idea of Open Access to scientific literature, these changes are not always positive.
Open Access has led to changes in publishers' business strategies which has consequently enabled the rise of a business model recently entitled as "predatory publishing". Predatory publishers and conference organizers focus only at the quantity of published articles, their main interest is to gain profit, obviously at the expense of quality of the published materials.
Fairly known practices how to balance at the edge of publication ethics provide the authors with the possibility to publish the same or very similar set of research outputs in multiple publications. This leads to asking many questions, e.g.
Why do so many publications have to be published? While searching for a complex answer we cannot avoid to see its relation to research assessment, national and institutional assessment schemes and the system of financing research from the public budget. This paper is aimed at describing the current situation in scientific publishing from the viewpoint of current analyses and studies as well as from personal experiences and feedback available to the Editors' office of scientific journals at the Central Library of the Czech Technical University in Prague.
The office publishes a well-established university journal that focuses on keeping the publishing standards and high quality of its publications. In cooperation with further departments of the library we use our experience to provide a wide range of support to young researchers and authors to be able to find their way through the scientific publishing system and to gain good publishing habits and ethical principles for their further academic and research career.