It's called "predatory open access". There's an influential blog on just the topic by academic librarian Jeffrey Beall at scholarlyoa.com. He maintains a "list of predatory publishers", and I'm pretty sure Academic Journals Online is on it somewhere.
I already mentioned this but it seems that the new trend in online adjunct teaching is to screen candidates based on publications, in particular for graduate courses. I just attended a meeting at a large online for profit school and the president gave us an speech about how important is to publish and how publications will be used to assign graduate courses to faculty. As there is a pressure to publish or just died, we will be seeing more journal mills that publish anything for a fee so the faculty can keep their current jobs. However, some universities are ahead of the game now, some only accept journals that are indexed in known indexes such as scopus, sci, ERA just mention a few. In the online world, it seems that the standard is cabells. Most of these predatory journals are not indexed in any of the above mentioned indexes. As the number of people with PhDs increases, the new differentiator will be the number of publications.
I am receiving a tremendious amount of spam, regarding publishing. It is impossible to stop the spam because it just keeps coming. I don't know if this one is spam because I always delete them, but here is another one:
