Open Access: A change maker
Academic Publishing has undergone a sea change over the past two decades with the introduction of a new form of publishing – Open Access (where authors or their institution pay upfront for making the published articles open to all). This was initially seen as a reprieve to the traditional subscription-based publishing, where the reader must pay for getting access to the articles through a subscription.
Open Access was perceived as a change maker for academic publishing, as pay-walled journals were controlled by a few major publishers, and libraries had to spend huge sums of money to get access to the scientific articles. But what started off with as a good reason to make scientific articles available to all has reached a stage where it has taken academic publishing to come in terms with what is popularly called as “predatory publishing” or “predatory Journals”, a term coined initially by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian from University of Colorado.
Legitimate open access publishers
With publishers such as PLOS and BioMed Central being the pioneers of commercial open access Journals, other major publishers also followed suite with their own open access Journals ranging from gold open access to hybrid open access. This paradigm shift of major publishers toward open access journals initiated many publishers from developing countries, to sense the opportunity with researchers struggling with “Publish or Perish”. Hindawi is one such publisher who moved towards the open access model in 2007 with around 100 Journals. They have been recently acquired by another major publisher, Wiley, for their commercially successful open access model.
Predatory Publishers
Inspired by the successful models of such publishers, came a mushrooming of open access journals who followed the same model of article publishing charges, but with no serious peer review and faster publication not exceeding 2-3 days. Such Journals majorly added to pseudoscience and they have also added to predatory Journal citations in Scopus’s database, nearly a staggering 300 potentially predatory Journals, according to a paper published by Scientometrics in Feb 2021, and retracted in Sep 2021, which could be primarily due to academic pressure, as the authors have disagreed with the retraction.
Not all open access journals are predatory
In the current scenario, academics have come to the conclusion that not all open access journals are predatory, as they follow standard practices of academic publishing. However, the major disadvantage of open access journals lie in their exorbitant APCs (Article Processing Charges), which defeat the very purpose of open access. With such high APCs, which (legitimate) publishers provide on their websites, vary from a few hundreds, up to thousands of dollars. APC’s tend to add to the financial burden of authors and their institutions, similar to the high fees charged by articles that exist behind pay walls of traditional journals. Even when the articles are free to read, according to many reports 90% of the research articles are read only by the authors, reviewers and editors of the Journals. So how is the author benefiting out of this model? Or how is it benefiting open science?
Subject Databases
One of the major challenges the world has faced the past two years has been the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. With scientists putting up lot of research on COVID, the World Health Organization (WHO) came up with a WHO: COVID-19 Literature on corona virus disease. This database provides a way for the general public, along with scientists, to check the scientific literature on COVID-19, in one place, and this also results in wider reach/dissemination.
However, we do not have a common database for other important research areas concerning the general public, such as “Cancer Research” or “Climate Change”. When we say open access, the main aim should be open science to all, and we need more such databases by international agencies like the United Nations to collate research articles on important areas such as the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, which should be the need of the hour. Such initiatives will help in the real dissemination of science to the general public, and give authors of important research contributions, the visibility they deserve. This will be unlike publishers asking authors to promote their articles and measuring them with their commercial metrics.
This model will be a real driver of change to promote science and benefit the research community and society at large.
Footnote
We are grateful to Renisha Winston, who is a guest author for this article. Thank you Renisha.
If you are interested in writing an article for us, please send us an email to admin@predatory-publishing.com, with a suggested title. We would be delighted to work with you.
