in Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview, para. “OA journals (“gold OA”)”., the first thing that the author states is that “OA journals conduct peer review”.
http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
Let’s say that a publishing platform let the author think that they sent out the submitted material to peers and the acceptance is based on their expert recommendations. It still does not change the fact that they did not conducted peer review. They can write acceptance emails, give certificates, put a statement in their website that “all published materials undergone double blind peer-review” etc., still does not matter. There are some exceptions, but usually the only proof for a peer review is the actual text of the peer review.
A peer review also presuppose peers. As i m not an expert in quantum geometry, i can not write a peer review for a qg ms. Even if i write a review for a manuscript dealing with that topic, it is still not the review of a peer. The same applies for the editor of any obscure journal who manage to find someone (anyone) to write a few praising words for Author X: Hu can’t say either that the manuscript was peer-reviewed. IMHO.
Some other iteresting quotes from Mr. Suber.
“There are two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles, OA journals (“gold OA”) and OA repositories (“green OA”). The chief difference between them is that OA journals conduct peer review and OA repositories do not.(…) Most activists refer to OA delivered by journals as gold OA (regardless of the journal’s business model), and to OA delivered by repositories as green OA. ”
“”A common misunderstanding is that all OA journals use an “author pays” business model. There are two mistakes here. The first is to assume that there is only one business model for OA journals, when there are many. The second is to assume that charging an upfront fee is an “author pays” model. In fact, most OA journals (70%) charge no author-side fees at all. Moreover, most conventional or non-OA journals (75%) do charge author-side fees. When OA journals do charge fees, the fees are usually (88%) paid by author-sponsors (employers or funders) or waived, not paid by authors out of pocket.”
I do not think that the quality of the peer review have any relevance in deciding the question whether a publishing platform is a “gold OA journal” or not.
