Note that "open access" in the context of academic publishing is a weasel word: it means that the submitters of the article have to pay for it instead of the readers. This can be quite expensive, hence the invention of predatory journals who want the money.
While this is true on its face, any OA publisher worth their salt offers a fee waiver program, and the expection from Day 1 of OA has been that these costs should be baked into grant applications and funding requests.
Many funding bodies and institutions take care of this for you, having OA funds and assistance to take care of OA fees and to help direct publishing scientists to non-predatory publishers (Elsevier in particular can charge obscene OA fees)and also pick up the tab.
As such, it is very unusual for a Submitting author to have to pay an OA charge.
COI statement: I used to work for an OA-only publisher, but have not been employed there for the last 2 years.
The ones who offered fee waiver programs weren't on his list, because they weren't predatory. For example, PNAS may not be a great journal, but it's OpenAcess and not predatory... hundreds of others with very similar names to high profile journals and fake conferences are predatory.
I wouldn't say that it's rare to have to pay (even for a non-free journal)... in fact it may be more common to pay just based on the number of predatory journals and their published articles, it just isn't ethical (either for the publisher or often for the writer).
Uh, submitters typically pay for all submissions, either in cash or in the requirement to sign over copyright to the journal.
Open Access is a trend to combatting the walled garden model of scientific publishing, and is perfectly legitimate.
Scammy journals are taking advantage of authors' needs to publish a lot of work in order to advance in their field. They are "open access" not because open access is a scam, but because the journal is a scam and it's hard to get people to pay for subscriptions to a scam journal.
"Uh, submitters typically pay for all submissions, either in cash or in the requirement to sign over copyright to the journal."
Yes. Even with "reputable" journals, the revenue flow often works like this:
1) The researcher does the research and writes the paper (usually at public expense).
2) The researcher submits the paper to a journal (often along with a hefty "publication fee"), where it is edited and peer-reviewed for "free" (i.e., also at public expense) by researchers at other institutions.
3) The researcher signs over the copyright to the journal.
4) The journal then charges other researchers, libraries, and the public (who have basically footed all the bills so far) another hefty fee if they want to read the paper.
That's the standard model. Beall's list was of journals that were abusive even by those standards.
I have never submitted a paper anywhere that had a publication fee. You generally pay to submit xor you pay to read, the and case is a distinct minority.
Maybe it depends on the field? Every journal I've submitted to (chemistry/physical chemistry) only asked for money after peer-review and acceptance. And these are the well-respected journals in the field.
quote "There is another list—one that journals fear. It is curated by Jeffrey Beall, a library scientist at the University of Colorado, Denver. His list is a single page on the Internet that names and shames what he calls "predatory" publishers. The term is a catchall for what Beall views as unprofessional practices, from undisclosed charges and poorly defined editorial hierarchy to poor English—criteria that critics say stack the deck against non-U.S. publishers."
Thanks for that link! I was unaware of this trend:
"the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.
"From humble and idealistic beginnings a decade ago, open-access scientific journals have mushroomed into a global industry, driven by author publication fees rather than traditional subscriptions. Most of the players are murky. The identity and location of the journals' editors, as well as the financial workings of their publishers, are often purposefully obscured.
1) Traditional Journals: author submits papers for free. Libraries pay to subscribe to journals. Articles are available online only for (very high) fees. The author typically has to sign over the copyright to the publishers, so now the publisher owns the final article, which often was entirely publicly funded (research, writing, peer review), yet there is no open access.
There are thousands of journals, but a few big publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor Francis) own most, and you might have come across their paywalls.
They make obscene profits - their inputs are basically free (articles, peer review), and they charge the libraries extortionate amounts, often through bundling (you want the prestigious journal you must have? well, you got to subscribe to all the other crap we publish, too), literally dollars per page.
2) Resistance. Scientists/librarians etc. noticed and objected. However, it is not easy to change:
Scientists need to publish, and they need to publish in high prestige/impact journals, and the prestige/impact is tied to the title, and the publishers own the titles. (The margins of academic publishers are abnormally high, indicating some sort of market failure.)
Nevertheless, an alternative emerged:
3) Open Access journals. They follow a different model - author retains copyright, and the journal allows open access to the finished article (by putting it on the web, say). As they don’t/can’t make money from subscriptions, they normally charge the author for publication.
So, this is a much better model in terms of, well, open access. Good thing. And, in fact, many grant giving entities (government bodies, Gates foundation, etc.) now stipulate that the research they sponsor has to be published with open access (and they often then cover publication fees).
However, now:
4) Predators: Where previously the journal had an incentive to make the bar for acceptance high (because they needed to sell the result), now, if you get the author to pay and don’t care about sales, you have an incentive to make the bar low.
Thus, predatory OA journals emerged that would basically take the author’s money, say, “yes, nice article, accepted”, and put it on some shoddy website. The author would put it on their publication list - which they now can blow up for a few hundred or thousand dollars.
"Beall's List" just listed these predatory journals of questionable quality that would just take your money and give you a "publication" to put on your CV. It was well know among librarians and scientists that cared, and apparently now it's gone.
(As a sidenote, there also seem to be conferences that are expensive and accept anything, typically in nice locations. So, you basically submit a talk/paper/poster, get a few days vacation, ideally get a travel grant, and then put it on your CV, too.)
what, do you suppose, is the purpose of an open-access journal? why wouldn't an author just self-publish on the web, or on their university department's web-site?
do you have an opinion on what exactly has caused the market failure in traditional journals? if fees are extortionate then why are there no competitors with more reasonable fees?
Because the scientific reputation (and career prospects) are tied to publications in reputable journals, to certain titles. And the titles belong to the publishers. There has been considerable consolidation over time, the big 4 or 5 have just bought up smaller publishers over time, and it's now run not by idealistic academics, but (by all appearances) by cold-blooded money guys trying to squeeze out as much as they can.
Competitors can't just enter - there's a signalling problem: how do you distinguish scientists that don't publish in the top journal because they're idealistically opposed to their closed-access practices, from those that cannot get published there because their work is not up to standards?
1) Open Access Journals: the editors do some editing and vetting, and, crucially, peer review. If you put an article on your website, it doesn't have the same standing, "it doesn't count" as a real article or for your publication list.
So, in terms of scientific reputation, for now:
Traditional journal > OA journal > self-published.
The challenge is to get OA >= traditional, and that takes a lot of time, or, rather, coordination:
Don Knuth sent a letter in 2003 to the editors of the Journal of Algorithms to persuade them to collectively resign and move to a different journal. People of that stature are needed to break the power of despicable academic publishers (Elsevier is particularly revolting, btw.)
TL;DR What Jeffrey Beall was doing could be described as one honest man trying to fight the predatory publishing mafia, by nothing else but exposing their misdeeds. Unfortunately, the mafia managed to silence him.
For those who do not know what predatory publishing is, it is basically the "business" similar to diploma mills: they issue crap credentials (by publishing "scientific articles") for a "modest" fee to people who need those credentials to be employed as "scientists", "researchers", and in many positions (including politics) that formally require those. It mostly happens in developing nations...
You wish. You see the same crap in regional universities - faculty must do "research" with undergrads and "publish" the stuff. Back then you had campus journals run by students, but now you have predatory journals. What you don't have is administration with a clue.
Administration entered working life sometime in the early 1990s with maybe one or two papers out of their PhD, they worked their way up the ranks and have no notion what they are doing. They may even think that someone who paid OMICS Open Chemistry to print the paper they wrote about the fluff in their belly button did good work. They may even require n papers for tenure. OMICS will provide! Junior faculty need tenure too!
The axe can't fall soon enough. You can't trust academia to police itself, we need academic administrators on a separate career track to police the bloody lot.
I live in a developing country, and I assure you it's much worse here. I know it _also_ happens in the developed world, that's why I wrote "mostly" in developing nations. The problem exists everywhere, though, and tends to increase.
I've always wondered about academia's habit of pulling its administrators from its ranks. I guess it makes some sense (similar to how an athlete might become a coach), but given that higher ed is essentially a government entity in the US, it seems to make more sense to bring in professional civil servants and administrators. It may create a different set of problems, of course, but academia's tendency to view itself as a thing apart, a thing it's not -- an independent, strictly scholarly entity -- seems to actually hurt its goals.
The formal, professional administration might be one of the sources of the problem. How is a professional administrator going to distinguish people? By looking at formal requirements, of course. So, how many papers does person X have? 3? Want to beef up the resume? Some hundreds/thousands of dollars invested and here you are - the same person with 78 papers.
What you really need is a sensible process that isn't administered by those subject to it. Else you have all the tenured faculty sitting in a circle, handing an easy job to the person on their right, and all the hard work that's left is dropped onto the untenured faculty. Or you have senior tenured faculty in their mid-50s dumb as nuts (because when they entered working life anyone with a pulse could find a nice job in industry) holding back junior faculty and progress in general, for fear that their achievements would throw shade on them. You can't rely on a sense of duty and community, that train left the US when Reagan came in.
The citation problem you already have. In a previous workplace the materials science people would push for a publication count. Of course they would! In that field the bar for a viable publication is much lower than in the life sciences.
I don't really agree. I'm not an academic, but it's my understanding is that academia's function is to advance human understanding of various topics. I would think injecting "professional civil servants and administrators" into the process would simply push the focus away from scholarship and towards more quotidian things that the government and the administrators are interested in.
Lists like Beall's seem like the way it ought to be done. The academic identify and compile lists of shoddy publications and their peers can treat those journals an as persona non grata.
What, exactly, are the quotidian things that the government and administrators are interested in? My point is that academics are already absurdly political, both internally (the fight for tenure and academic domain) and external (budgets and priorities). The people who run academia are already basically professional administrators, once you've set on an administrative path, research is very hard to undertake. Why continue with the charade? In my experience, most administrators just want to do their job. I think it's easy to underestimate the number of workaday government administrators that run water treatment plants, streetlights, engineers, etc, that just want to do their job efficiently.
The point is that scientific process requires personal integrity and independence. The role of scientist is more similar in that regard to the role of a judge that to the role of a water treatment engineer.
> we need academic administrators on a separate career track to police the bloody lot.
No, we don't. Predatory journals are neither run by nor wanted by the academic community. They are a product of exactly such administrators looking at useless stats such as # of papers published in a "journal".
We don't need better trained bureaucrats that will ultimately still just look at "n papers published" or "x citations" or any other mindlessly calculated statistic.
The administrators you mention do not sound like peers (as in peer-review), but more like they are no longer involved in research and just do administrative tasks. If that is the case, then maybe they are simply the wrong people for the job.
Very few people can accurately assess the quality/impact of research, and most of these are the peers themselves, i.e. the researchers/academics currently active in the area. Lists like the one discussed are a helpful tool to do that assessment quicker, as some publications can be immediately flagged for lacking peer-review. But they do not replace actually understanding the research.
Hopefully, this is just another step towards a better scientific publishing system. Beall's list had flaws, and people rightfully didn't trust a list made by a single guy without oversight, but it existed to fill an important need. We'll see what system replaces it.
I hope someone else takes up the mantle and continues to curate the list. Unfortunately Beall was in a unique position of respect and academic standing where his opinion carried most of the value of the list. On its own without the continued careful vetting by a well-respected and unbiased professional in the scientific community the list is pretty much worthless.
> Cabell’s, which offers services that help librarians, researchers and others discover scholarly journals, has since 2015 worked with Beall on developing a journal blacklist. That list is slated to launch this spring.
> OMICS International, a publisher Beall has previously described as “the worst of the worst,” in 2013 threatened to sue Beall, seeking $1 billion in damages.
$1 billion in damages? Against a librarian? It seems like OMICS International has confirmed they're the worst of the worst.
If I had time today, I would totally put this up on a github repo. It might not be easy for one person to keep this up, but with pull requests + a github.io domain, we could keep this good work going.
I'll be happy to help with getting the data archive.org data if someone gets this started.
I really like what these guys are trying to do and it goes hand in hand with the topic here. It's 100% legal. Please help spread the word. I contribute the the swarm whenever I can since I don't have bandwidth limits on my household connection. Comcast put 1 TB monthly caps on ~20 states last year, but the northeast is thankfully too competitive to let that fly, especially with Fios also being available here.
38 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadAs such, it is very unusual for a Submitting author to have to pay an OA charge.
COI statement: I used to work for an OA-only publisher, but have not been employed there for the last 2 years.
I wouldn't say that it's rare to have to pay (even for a non-free journal)... in fact it may be more common to pay just based on the number of predatory journals and their published articles, it just isn't ethical (either for the publisher or often for the writer).
Open Access is a trend to combatting the walled garden model of scientific publishing, and is perfectly legitimate.
Scammy journals are taking advantage of authors' needs to publish a lot of work in order to advance in their field. They are "open access" not because open access is a scam, but because the journal is a scam and it's hard to get people to pay for subscriptions to a scam journal.
Yes. Even with "reputable" journals, the revenue flow often works like this:
1) The researcher does the research and writes the paper (usually at public expense). 2) The researcher submits the paper to a journal (often along with a hefty "publication fee"), where it is edited and peer-reviewed for "free" (i.e., also at public expense) by researchers at other institutions. 3) The researcher signs over the copyright to the journal. 4) The journal then charges other researchers, libraries, and the public (who have basically footed all the bills so far) another hefty fee if they want to read the paper.
That's the standard model. Beall's list was of journals that were abusive even by those standards.
Google ["page fees"], and you'll find a whole bunch of them.
quote "There is another list—one that journals fear. It is curated by Jeffrey Beall, a library scientist at the University of Colorado, Denver. His list is a single page on the Internet that names and shames what he calls "predatory" publishers. The term is a catchall for what Beall views as unprofessional practices, from undisclosed charges and poorly defined editorial hierarchy to poor English—criteria that critics say stack the deck against non-U.S. publishers."
"the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.
"From humble and idealistic beginnings a decade ago, open-access scientific journals have mushroomed into a global industry, driven by author publication fees rather than traditional subscriptions. Most of the players are murky. The identity and location of the journals' editors, as well as the financial workings of their publishers, are often purposefully obscured.
1) Traditional Journals: author submits papers for free. Libraries pay to subscribe to journals. Articles are available online only for (very high) fees. The author typically has to sign over the copyright to the publishers, so now the publisher owns the final article, which often was entirely publicly funded (research, writing, peer review), yet there is no open access.
There are thousands of journals, but a few big publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor Francis) own most, and you might have come across their paywalls.
They make obscene profits - their inputs are basically free (articles, peer review), and they charge the libraries extortionate amounts, often through bundling (you want the prestigious journal you must have? well, you got to subscribe to all the other crap we publish, too), literally dollars per page.
2) Resistance. Scientists/librarians etc. noticed and objected. However, it is not easy to change:
Scientists need to publish, and they need to publish in high prestige/impact journals, and the prestige/impact is tied to the title, and the publishers own the titles. (The margins of academic publishers are abnormally high, indicating some sort of market failure.)
Nevertheless, an alternative emerged:
3) Open Access journals. They follow a different model - author retains copyright, and the journal allows open access to the finished article (by putting it on the web, say). As they don’t/can’t make money from subscriptions, they normally charge the author for publication.
So, this is a much better model in terms of, well, open access. Good thing. And, in fact, many grant giving entities (government bodies, Gates foundation, etc.) now stipulate that the research they sponsor has to be published with open access (and they often then cover publication fees).
However, now:
4) Predators: Where previously the journal had an incentive to make the bar for acceptance high (because they needed to sell the result), now, if you get the author to pay and don’t care about sales, you have an incentive to make the bar low.
Thus, predatory OA journals emerged that would basically take the author’s money, say, “yes, nice article, accepted”, and put it on some shoddy website. The author would put it on their publication list - which they now can blow up for a few hundred or thousand dollars.
"Beall's List" just listed these predatory journals of questionable quality that would just take your money and give you a "publication" to put on your CV. It was well know among librarians and scientists that cared, and apparently now it's gone.
(As a sidenote, there also seem to be conferences that are expensive and accept anything, typically in nice locations. So, you basically submit a talk/paper/poster, get a few days vacation, ideally get a travel grant, and then put it on your CV, too.)
what, do you suppose, is the purpose of an open-access journal? why wouldn't an author just self-publish on the web, or on their university department's web-site?
do you have an opinion on what exactly has caused the market failure in traditional journals? if fees are extortionate then why are there no competitors with more reasonable fees?
Because the scientific reputation (and career prospects) are tied to publications in reputable journals, to certain titles. And the titles belong to the publishers. There has been considerable consolidation over time, the big 4 or 5 have just bought up smaller publishers over time, and it's now run not by idealistic academics, but (by all appearances) by cold-blooded money guys trying to squeeze out as much as they can.
Competitors can't just enter - there's a signalling problem: how do you distinguish scientists that don't publish in the top journal because they're idealistically opposed to their closed-access practices, from those that cannot get published there because their work is not up to standards?
1) Open Access Journals: the editors do some editing and vetting, and, crucially, peer review. If you put an article on your website, it doesn't have the same standing, "it doesn't count" as a real article or for your publication list.
So, in terms of scientific reputation, for now:
Traditional journal > OA journal > self-published.
The challenge is to get OA >= traditional, and that takes a lot of time, or, rather, coordination:
Don Knuth sent a letter in 2003 to the editors of the Journal of Algorithms to persuade them to collectively resign and move to a different journal. People of that stature are needed to break the power of despicable academic publishers (Elsevier is particularly revolting, btw.)
See
http://theoryofcomputing.org/crisis.html
Here some more background:
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/08/17/deceptive-pub...
(So, Beall's was a black list, and the DOAJ has sort of a white list.)
For those who do not know what predatory publishing is, it is basically the "business" similar to diploma mills: they issue crap credentials (by publishing "scientific articles") for a "modest" fee to people who need those credentials to be employed as "scientists", "researchers", and in many positions (including politics) that formally require those. It mostly happens in developing nations...
You wish. You see the same crap in regional universities - faculty must do "research" with undergrads and "publish" the stuff. Back then you had campus journals run by students, but now you have predatory journals. What you don't have is administration with a clue.
Administration entered working life sometime in the early 1990s with maybe one or two papers out of their PhD, they worked their way up the ranks and have no notion what they are doing. They may even think that someone who paid OMICS Open Chemistry to print the paper they wrote about the fluff in their belly button did good work. They may even require n papers for tenure. OMICS will provide! Junior faculty need tenure too!
The axe can't fall soon enough. You can't trust academia to police itself, we need academic administrators on a separate career track to police the bloody lot.
That's interesting. What did faculty do before predatory open access came along? Are the pressures the same as here in the US at minor colleges?
The citation problem you already have. In a previous workplace the materials science people would push for a publication count. Of course they would! In that field the bar for a viable publication is much lower than in the life sciences.
Lists like Beall's seem like the way it ought to be done. The academic identify and compile lists of shoddy publications and their peers can treat those journals an as persona non grata.
No, we don't. Predatory journals are neither run by nor wanted by the academic community. They are a product of exactly such administrators looking at useless stats such as # of papers published in a "journal".
We don't need better trained bureaucrats that will ultimately still just look at "n papers published" or "x citations" or any other mindlessly calculated statistic.
The administrators you mention do not sound like peers (as in peer-review), but more like they are no longer involved in research and just do administrative tasks. If that is the case, then maybe they are simply the wrong people for the job.
Very few people can accurately assess the quality/impact of research, and most of these are the peers themselves, i.e. the researchers/academics currently active in the area. Lists like the one discussed are a helpful tool to do that assessment quicker, as some publications can be immediately flagged for lacking peer-review. But they do not replace actually understanding the research.
$1 billion in damages? Against a librarian? It seems like OMICS International has confirmed they're the worst of the worst.
I'll be happy to help with getting the data archive.org data if someone gets this started.
I really like what these guys are trying to do and it goes hand in hand with the topic here. It's 100% legal. Please help spread the word. I contribute the the swarm whenever I can since I don't have bandwidth limits on my household connection. Comcast put 1 TB monthly caps on ~20 states last year, but the northeast is thankfully too competitive to let that fly, especially with Fios also being available here.
- https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%...
- https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20170112125427/https://scholarly...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20170111172309/https://scholarly...