With every opportunity comes someone willing to try and cash in on things. In the Open Access world, the moment institutions agreed to Pay to have Scholarly Articles published in journals (i.e. Article Processing Charges or APCs) someone else decided to put up scam Open Access Journals and charge a publication fee without the regular services that accompany Scholarly Journals... most notably little to non-existent Peer-Review.
These are known as Predatory Publishers and they need to be avoided at all costs.
In many institutions, a check will occur before financing for a publication is allowed.
To learn more about Predatory Publishers and how to avoid them consult our Predatory Publishers libguide.
Predatory Journals are not the only ones causing some consternation in the Open Access world.
Traditional scholarly publishers are also coming under fire for asking institutions to pay OA fees and then asking their libraries to pay for a rapidly increasing subscription fee to access those articles that are not OA.
This is what is known as Double Dipping.