“Although predatory publishers predate open access, their
recent explosion was expedited by the emergence of fee-charging OA journals. Monica
Berger and Jill
Cirasella argue that librarians can play an important role in
helping researchers to avoid becoming prey. But there remains ambiguity over
what makes a publisher predatory. Librarians can help to counteract the
misconceptions and alarmism that stymie the acceptance of OA.”
They have some valid points, but there is also much that I disagree
with. They spend too much time criticizing Jeffrey Beall for not being
sufficiently supportive of OA. In addition, they confuse the issue of low
quality and predatory. There are a lot of low quality journals out there, but
they do not charge large fees to publish papers on line, they do not advertise that
you can have your paper published in a month, they do provide some peer review
and editing. They do not face up to the costs of the rush to OA, especially
attempts to mandate publication in OA journals.
Open access is not the same thing as predatory. Open access
means that people can view a piece of scholarship without having to pay a fee,
either directly or indirectly through their school or employer. Predatory
journals exist to make money by selling false information. The false
information that they sell is that the papers in them have been published in a
peer reviewed journal. Academics pay the predatory publisher to say that their
paper has been published in a peer reviewed journal; the academics then put the
lie into their cvs and their annual activity reports and their tenure and
promotion files. After examining a number of these journals I am convinced that
it is all too easy tell legitimate publishers from predatory publishers. The
researchers that publish in these fake journals are not being preyed upon; the
people that are led to believe that these researchers are publishing in peer
reviewed journals are the prey. Beall’slist is really more of a tool for these people than it is for researchers.
Being open access does not prove that a journal is predatory.
Not being open access does not prove that a journal is not predatory. There is,
however, a connection between open access and predatory publishers. Legitimate
open access journals have created an opportunity for predatory publishers by
publishing online and charging fees. Predatory publishers mimic these features,
but, unlike traditional journals they have no incentive to provide peer review
and editing. Traditional journals have an incentive to engage in careful peer
review and editing. They need to get people to buy their journal. The articles
have to be good enough that universities, members of an association, or people
in the field will be willing to pay to read them. Predatory publishers have no
incentive to expend time and resources on peer review and editing. The last
thing they want is to have anyone read the articles. If you read something like this it
will only make it harder to tell people that you thought you were publishing in
a legitimate journal.
Personally, I do not see publication in traditional journals
as incompatible with open access. I noted in a previous post that I went
through a recent issue of The American Economic
Review and was able to find an open access, or ungated, version of every
paper. In addition, we were hiring this
year and pretty much everyone had a website with access to their job market
paper. There are often some differences between the “ungated” version of a
paper and published version of a paper; if you want to cite a paper you should
probably get access to the published version. But if the issue is simply access
to research results the ungated version will typically provide this. It seems
to me that this general approach existed in economics for a long time. Even
before widespread access to the internet economists distributed working papers.
Pretty much anyone who mattered had
probably read your paper years before it appeared in print. There may be reasons why this approach will
not work in some disciplines. There may even be reasons it will not continue to
work in economics, but advocates for open access journals need to acknowledge
the problems they give rise to and the possible alternatives.
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