We cover the relative trustworthiness of open access journals here from time to time, and the presumption is always that traditional publishers are reliable, authoritative. I have always railed against that suggestion, because I don't believe they are more trustworthy at all. Here is evidence showing that big publishers are, in some ways, manifestly untrustworthy: "on Thursday, it was revealed that pharmaceutical company Merck, Sharp & Dohme paid Elsevier to produce a fake medical journal that, to any superficial examination, looked like a real medical journal but was in reality nothing more than advertising for Merck." Commercial publishers don't care about science, they care about profit. See also Crooked Timber on astroturf journals, along with Bioethics on the phony journal scandal and TechDirt on Elsevier Exposed.
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