I found few open access journals that show quite good quality articles. However, I have been advised that open access journals may be predatory. When I searched websites, I was surprised that all lists are "possibly" predatory journals. I tried to figure out why these lists are "possibly" predatory. One of the answers is that the websites claiming predatory publishers attempt to avoid judicial consequences. On the other hand, I also found that editors from the conventional publishers could have conflict of interests with competing open access publishers. I am completely puzzled and do not know if these lists of "possibly" predatory journals are due to conflict of interests or due to commercial interest of the open access journals. I want to publish my research paper timely and do not know if I should choose an open access journal. And, if yes, then how to find a reputable open access journal? Please advise.
This question is in response to . The original post mentioned that they wish to retract their paper from a "fake" journal. I don't know what a fake journal is but better safe than sorry so I want to make sure what defines a fake journal. In the comments, other people also mentioned "shady" journals and "predatory" journals. This is the first time I encounter these descriptions so I would like to know more about what they entail. I would be interested in hearing about your experience with such journals as well, if any.
What does "isomorphic" mean in linear algebra? Can polymorphing monsters spam their ability to effectively give themselves a massive health pool? Some creatures have an ability that lets them polymorph, such as the Couatl's Change Shape action. I am wondering if this ability could be used again whenever the form is dropped to give the creature a massive effective health pool.  For example, if the Couatl used their action to Change Shape and become a Veteran, then was hit for enough damage to kill the polymorphed form, could it then re-use the Change Shape ability to transform into a fully healed Veteran once more? Are there any non-green, non-artifact mana ramp cards? I have looked and can't seem to find any.  I have seen many green cards and some artifacts that do this, but nothing in Red, Blue, Black or White.    Are there any?  Note: By "Mana Ramp" I mean a card that generates mana, or one that lets you play more than one land per turn.  The end result, for example, would be on turn 4, playing a white only deck, I could tap more than 4 mana.  (Normally you only get one land per turn so a max of 4 mana on turn 4.) Limit Ordinal Question how to prove this result.     $\alpha$ is limit ordinal if and only if $\beta&lt;\alpha$ implies $\beta+1&lt;\alpha$ for any $\beta$.   I am getting confused because of the definition of limit ordinal. it says     $\alpha=\sup\{\beta: \beta&lt;\alpha\}=\bigcup\alpha$    for sup I am ok but for $\alpha=\bigcup\alpha$ how ?? Rounded corners in TikZ trees. I'm trying to find a way to automatically clean/delete the temporary files from C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temp\ at shutdown/boot on my Windows XP Professional x64 SP2 machine.  The main reason for this is to clean Local Settings/Temp to remove old junk automatically. (I had thought I had this covered through Firefox settings, but I was only clearing temporary Internet files). Currently, there's around 3&nbsp;GB of temporary files, and I'd like to prevent this build up without having to remember to do anything on my part.  I have already looked at using  (explained in Super User question ), but it doesn't seem to touch that directory.  I'm aware of programs such as , but I would ideally like to use a solution that doesn't require additional software (so, I expect, something using a scheduled BAT/CMD script would be what I'm looking for).  One of the potential issues, I believe, is that there may be legitimate files in the Temp folder that may be needed on the next boot (for software installations or updates, for example) and the perfect solution would be able to distinguish those and leave them until they weren't needed (Note: I realise this perfect solution may not be reasonably possible).  I've already set up Disk Cleaner on a shutdown script, but when cleaning temporary files, Disk Cleaner doesn't clean this particular directory, and so I'm looking for alternative options (see Super User question  for a little more detail).  So, what are my options for automatically deleting the temp files from C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temp? Variance of sample mean. Let $X_1, X_2, \ldots X_n$ be random variables with mean $\mu$ and variance $\sigma^2$. We define the sample mean $\bar{X} = \sum_{i = 1}^n X_i$.  I am having trouble understanding why the variance of $\bar{X}$ is $\sigma^2 / n$.  Here is what I worked out thus far:  $$\begin{gather} \sigma_\bar{X}^2 = E((\bar{X} - \mu)^2) = E(\bar{X}^2 - 2\bar{X}\mu + \mu^2) = E(\bar{X}^2) - 2\mu E(\bar{X}) + E(\mu^2) = E(\bar{X}^2) - \mu. \end{gather}$$  However, I'm not sure what to do with the $E(\bar{X}^2)$. diameter on a compact metric space I have troubles showing the following:  Let $(X,\rho)$ be a compact metric space and $F \subset X$ a closed subset. Prove that if diam $F &lt; \infty$, then there exist $x_{0}, y_{0} \in F$ such that diam $F= \rho(x_{0},y_{0})$.  It looks so trivial yet hard to find the trick. Should individual letters be preceded with "an"? I was reading a comic book and I noticed that the author used "an A" and "an N" in a particular phrase (screenshot below). While I understand the usage of "An A" here (A being a vowel and what not) and "N" having a pronunciation which has a sound similar to "A".  Since most of English alphabets have pronunciations which start with a syllable similar to one of the vowels or semi-vowels; is it OK to prefix the letters using "An"?  For eg. An X, or An Y.        Zenescope's Grimm Fairy Tales - Werewolves: The Hunger, page #8 (Click to enlarge) Any time I am inserting new point feature in QGIS, the Feature Attribute dialog box is popping up. Is there a way to prevent it? (I am willing to insert many points at once and this pop up box slows down the process). What happens if a Rainbow Servant takes levels in Mystic Theurge? Let $\mu$ be a general measure, suppose $f,g$ has compact support on $\mathbb{R}$, when does the integration by parts formula hold $$\int f'g d\mu = - \int g'fd\mu?$$ I know in general this is false, we can take $\mu$ to be supported on a point, say $0$, then it is not necessarily true that  $$f'(0)g(0) = -g'(0)f(0).$$  If $\mu$ is absolute continuous w.r.t. Lebesgue measure, we have $\frac{d\mu}{dx} = h$ $$\int f'gd\mu = \int f'gh dx = -\int f(gh)'dx$$ where $(gh)'dx$ might be a measure. but we can not recover the form $\int g'fh dx$.  Thank you very much! What happens to the temperature when an ideal gas is compressed? I am rather confused about this. I know from Charles' law that under constant pressure, the volume of a gas is directly proportional to its absolute temperature i.e.  $$\frac{V_1}{T_1} = \frac{V_2}{T_2}$$  Thus accordingly, during compression, temperature of the gas would decrease. But in Lectures of physics ,vol 1 by Feynman, it is written:     Suppose that the piston moves inward, so that the atoms are slowly compressed into a smaller space. What happens when an atom hits the moving piston? Evidently it picks up speed from the collision. [...] So the atoms are "hotter" when they come away from the piston than they were before they struck it. Therefore all the atoms which are in the vessel will have picked up speed. This means that when we compress a gas slowly, the temperature of the gas increases.   (Constant pressure?) So, this is contrary to Charles' law. Why does this happen? Who is right? Or are they both correct? I am confused. Help. Is there a reason I would not add /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin, /sbin to my path on Debian? What does the tilde (~) mean at the end of a filename? What is the file with the ~ at the end of the filename for?  $ ls # aliased to add flags -rwxrwxr-x  1 durrantm  2741 May 16 09:28 strip_out_rspec_prep_cmds.sh~* drwxrwxr-x 13 durrantm  4096 May 16 14:21 ../ -rwxrwxr-x  1 durrantm  2221 May 16 14:58 strip_out_rspec_prep_cmds.sh*   This is not the same as .swp files which are there while editing.  The two files have quite a few differences and the newer file (no ~ at the end) has the most recent changes and those changes are not in the older (~) file.  Looks like I can delete it? How come Dropbox gets an icon in Finder sidebar? How come Dropbox gets a non-generic icon in Finder's sidebar, when other directories like Google Drive and Sites (native in OS X before Lion) all have the same generic one?    How can I customise the icons used by the folders in the sidebar? OS X used to show individual icons of all folders there — not any longer. I have a script that needs to do some stuff based on file creation &amp; modification dates but has to run on Linux &amp; Windows.  What's the best cross-platform way to get file creation &amp; modification date/times in Python? How do you create grass? I'd like to extract the text from an HTML file using Python.  I want essentially the same output I would get if I copied the text from a browser and pasted it into notepad.    I'd like something more robust than using regular expressions that may fail on poorly formed HTML.  I've seen many people recommend Beautiful Soup, but I've had a few problems using it.  For one, it picked up unwanted text, such as JavaScript source.  Also, it did not interpret HTML entities.  For example, I would expect &amp;#39; in HTML source to be converted to an apostrophe in text, just as if I'd pasted the browser content into notepad.  Update html2text looks promising. It handles HTML entities correctly and ignores JavaScript.  However, it does not exactly produce plain text; it produces markdown that would then have to be turned into plain text. It comes with no examples or documentation, but the code looks clean.    Related questions: System settings won't open on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS after adding System76/pop PPA