In . . . and Out: Open Access Publishing in Scientific Journals - Salem et al (original) (raw)
Open access (OA) journals are a growing phenomenon largely of the past decade wherein readers can access the content of scientific journals without paying for a subscription. The costs are borne by authors (or their institutions) who pay a fee to be published, thus allowing readers to access, search, print, and cite the journals without cost. Although the OA model, in and of itself, need not diminish scientific rigor, selectivity, or peer review, the "author pays" model creates an inherent conflict of interest: it operates with the incentive on the part of the journal to publish more and reject less. This is coupled with cost containment measures that affect the journals' ability to engage experienced editors and professional staff to scrutinize data, data analyses, and author conflicts of interest. While some OA journals appear to be comparable to their print competitors, others are "predatory" and have no legitimacy at all. Two recent "scams"-one recently published in Science-highlight the urgency of addressing the issues raised by OA publication so that OA does not lose its credibility just as it begins to gather substantial momentum. High-quality journals develop their reputations over time, and OA outlets will be no exception. For this to occur, however, the OA audience will need to be satisfied that OA can deliver high-quality publications utilizing rigorous peer review, editing, and conflict of interest scrutiny. Academic tenure and promotion committees that review scholarly credentials are understandably skeptical of publications in unrecognized journals, and the large number of new OA outlets contributes to this urgency from their perspective as well.
Sign up for access to the world's latest research.
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Related papers
What Matters More in Open Access Journal Publishing: Scientific Rigor or Financial Vigor?
Human Technology, 2021
Academics and librarians around the world are raising concern about the current state of scholarly journal publishing in that the majority of journals are under the control of five multinational commercial journal publishing companies. Some are advocating for scholars to take back control of scholarly communication, particularly because it is the academics who are supplying and managing most of the content for journals. Open access publishing is one option, but the question of sustainability in funding streams raises concerns. Also the roles of scholarly societies, academic association, and universities in looking for stability in nonprofit journal publishing are discussed.
Predatory Open Access Journals: Risks of Association
The Language Teacher, 2019
Open access journals can be broadly defined as those freely available to readers online. While they are lauded by proponents for improving access to information, not all are completely open. Many offer access to some content while restricting access to other articles, and still others provide full online access after a certain time period. JALT publications, for example, are available to non-JALT members after six months. Multiple studies indicate that open access research is significantly more likely to be cited than research published in non-open-access journals. There are two major open access models - those that charge authors to publish, and those funded under any of multiple other business models. Those charging authors are known as “gold open access”, and this article investigates the ethics of paying to publish. The primary concern is that objectivity in the peer-review process is compromised by profit motives. University of Colorado at Denver librarian Jeffrey Beall dubbed them “predatory journals,” and his account of them is discussed next.
Open access journals – what publishers offer, what researchers want
The SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project has analyzed the current supply and demand situation in the open access journal landscape. Starting from the Directory of Open Access Journals, several sources of data were considered, including journal websites and direct inquiries within the publishing industry to comprehensively map the present supply of online peer-reviewed OA journals. The demand for open access publishing is summarised, as assessed through a large-scale survey of researchers' opinions and attitudes. Some forty thousand answers were collected across disciplines and around the world, reflecting major support for the idea of open access, while highlighting drivers of and barriers to open access publishing.
Open Access is Reinventing Scientific Publishing
2014
The development of the internet coupled with the dramatic increase in journal subscription fees in the 90s have triggered the creation of Open Access. This movement in the scientific publishing world promotes universal access to scientific research findings free of charge, challenging the 350 years old world of print that has been largely championed by scholars and librarians. Since inception of the movement, Open Access has grabbed significant attention of many in and outside the academic world and resulted in the appearance of many OA scholarly journal publications.
Research Article, 2022
This article is intended to highlight the issue of predatory journals and how they have been used to degrade the open-access journals to be perceived as predatory ones. Since many of the predatory journals are available for readers free of cost over the internet (which is among one of the many features of open-access journals/publications), the international wave of the scientific community against predatory journals stigmatized and victimized the entire open-access model of scientific publication to be perceived as substandard quality. This article critically analyzes the definitions of predatory journals and identified key characteristics of predatory journals. It is observed that lack of peer-review and charging high Article Processing Charges (APC) from authors are the two most common features of predatory journals, whereas open-access journals strictly adhere to peer-review criteria and have a clear guideline and information about the article processing fee. Knowingly or unknowingly, several authors mentioned that predatory journals are mostly open access, an overgeneralization of the author pay model upon which open access lies. Peer-review is an essential component of open access journals but not predatory journals; thus, considering predatory journals under the broad notion of open-access model of publication is unfair, stigmatizing and victimizing the open-access journals and keeping them at risk of degradation. Associating open-access journals with predatory ones is a nuisance as both have different aims, modus-operandi, and quality concerns. Therefore, there is a dire need to make policies to discourage predatory practices without victimizing the noble idea of open-access journals/publications.
Knowledge, 2022
It appears that open access (OA) academic publishing is better for science because it provides frictionless access to make significant advancements in knowledge. OA also benefits individual researchers by providing the widest possible audience and concomitant increased citation rates. OA publishing rates are growing fast as increasing numbers of funders demand it and is currently dominated by gold OA (authors pay article processing charges (APCs)). Academics with limited financial resources perceive they must choose between publishing behind pay walls or using research funds for OA publishing. Worse, many new OA journals with low APCs did not have impact factors, which reduces OA selection for tenure track professors. Such unpleasant choices may be dissolving. This article provides analysis with a free and open source python script to collate all journals with impact factors with the now more than 12,000 OA journals that are truly platinum OA (neither the author nor the readers pay for the peer-reviewed work). The results found platinum OA is growing faster than both academic publishing and OA publishing. There are now over 350 platinum OA journals with impact factors over a wide variety of academic disciplines, giving most academics options for OA with no APCs.
Publishing in predatory open access journals: Authors' perspectives
The proliferation of predatory or bogus journals has been recognized as a threat to academic research, and this study was conducted to discover the experiences of authors published in these journals. Eighty authors who had published in journals identified as predatory were surveyed. We asked how the authors learnt about these journals, what they thought about the reputation of the journals, their experiences of peer review and the quality of feedback provided, and whether publication was driven by PhD or job requirements. Our results showed that a third of authors discovered the journals by web searches or responding to email invitations. Over half said the reputation and name of the journal were important in selecting a journal, although a third admitted that the journal they published in did not have a good reputation. The main reason for selecting the journals was the promise of fast publication (31.2% respondents). Only half of the respondents said that publication was driven by PhD or job requirements. Just over a third reported that peer review was good or excellent, and only 17.5% said that peer review was poor or non-existent-over 70% thought they had received good feedback from the journals. Although the research was somewhat limited, it does indicate general satisfaction with the journals in which the authors published. Fast publication coupled with good feedback and encouragement to submit can make publishing in predatory journals so tempting that few authors can resist.
Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication
Almost 50% of scholarly articles are now open access in some form. This greatly benefits scholars at most institutions and is especially helpful to independent scholars and those without access to libraries. It also furthers the long-standing idea of knowledge as a public good. The changing dynamics of open access (OA) threaten this positive development by solidifying the pay-to-publish OA model which further marginalizes peripheral scholars and incentivizes the development of sub-standard and predatory journals. Causal loop diagrams (CLDs) are used to illustrate these interactions.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.