Open Access Journals as Advertising

Noam Nisan has a new post equating open access journals to advertising. While Nisan says he does not support “closed” journals, he argues that open access journals with minimal referees do little for the reader. From the post:

From my point of view, this reduction in the role of referees makes the journal superflous: information that is unfiltered for quality, becomes useless since it is impossible to find the good stuff there — you might as well just put your paper on the arXiv…