“Yet, even leaving the Open Access versus Subscription argument aside, it is simply ludicrous to blame the countless high quality ethical open access publishers for the predatory journals.”
Category Archives: oa.comment
Predatory journals: Not just a problem in developing world countries, says new Nature paper – Retraction Watch at Retraction Watch
“‘Common wisdom,’ according to the authors of a new piece in Nature, “assumes that the hazard of predatory publishing is restricted mainly to the developing world.” But the authors of the new paper, led by David Moher of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, found that more than half — 57% — of the 2,000 articles published in journals they determined were predatory were from high-income countries. In fact, the U.S. was second only to India in number of articles published in such journals. We asked Moher, who founded Ottawa Hospital’s Centre for Journalology in 2015, a few questions about the new work.”
A Confusion of Journals – What Is PubMed Now? – The Scholarly Kitchen
“Now, a new twist is emerging, and that seems to be that PubMed may be consciously or unwittingly acting as a facilitator of predatory or unscrupulous publishing.
In a paper published in Neuroscience, the authors analyzing the neurology and neuroscience journals included in PubMed found that:
- Twenty-five predatory neurology journals were indexed in PubMed, accounting for 24.7% of all predatory neurology journals.
- Fourteen predatory neuroscience journals were indexed in PubMed, accounting for 16.1% of all predatory neuroscience journals.
- Only one of the 188 predatory neuroscience or neurology journals appeared in the DOAJ index.
- Only 54.6% of the journals deemed predatory in neuroscience actually contained articles.”
Elsevier acquisition highlights the need for community-based scholarly communication infrastructure – SPARC
“Like many others in the scholarly community, we were very disappointed to learn about the recent acquisition by Elsevier of bepress, the provider of the popular Digital Commons repository platform.1The acquisition is especially troubling for the hundreds of institutions that use Digital Commons to support their open access repositories. These institutions now find their repository services owned and managed by Elsevier, a company well known for its obstruction of open access and repositories.2
While we were disappointed, we were not surprised. Elsevier’s interest in bepress and Digital Commons is reflective of the company’s long term strategy to stake an ownership claim in all the functions vital to the research cycle—from data gathering and annotation, to sharing and publication, to analytics and evaluation. Prior high-profile acquisitions (including SSRN and Mendeley) have made this strategy crystal clear. While this might be a smart business move on the part of a commercial company, it presents significant challenges and risks to the academic and research community.
The dangers inherent in the increasing control of crucial research communication functions in the hands of a small number of commercial players are well-known and well-documented.3 The dysfunction in the academic journal market serves as a case in point. This consolidated control has led to unaffordable costs, limited utility of research articles, the proliferation of western publishing biases, and a system in which publisher lock-in through big deal licenses is the norm. This situation is damaging for the research enterprise, individual researchers, and for society. Further consolidation of the market across functions and platforms—including key elements like research information systems and open access repositories—will exacerbate this already unhealthy situation.”
Academic Publication Rights Cause European Dispute : Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search
“Being published is the bread and butter of intellectuals, especially academics. publication, in theory, is a way for information to be shared across the globe, but it also has become big business. In a recent Chemistry World article the standoff between Germany’s Project DEAL (a consortium comprised of German universities) and Dutch publisher, Elsevier, is examined along with possible fall-out from the end result.
At the heart of the dispute is who controls the publications. Currently, Elsevier holds the cards and has wielded their power to make a clear point on the matter. Project DEAL, though, is not going down without a fight and Chemistry World quotes Horst Hippler, a physical chemist and chief negotiator for Project DEAL, as saying,
In the course of digitisation, science communication is undergoing a fundamental transformation process. Comprehensive, free and – above all – sustainable access to scientific publications is of immense importance to our researchers. We therefore will actively pursue the transformation to open access, which is an important building block in the concept of open science. To this end, we want to create a fair and sustainable basis through appropriate licensing agreements with Elsevier and other scientific publishers.
As publications are moving farther from ink and paper and more to digital who owns the rights to the information is becoming murkier. It will be interesting to see how this battle plays out and if any more disgruntled academics jump on board.”
Making Early European Books Open Access | On the Trail of the Bianchi of 1399
“The Wellcome Library’s Early Modern European Book collection is currently accessible at Early European Books online. At the moment, you need a login and to physically be in the UK to see these books. The Wellcome are in the process of making 10% of these holdings open access, and I’m getting to choose about 200 volumes for this purpose. Incunabula, so books from the first 50 years of printing, will be automatically included, so I’m looking through the catalogue at books printed after around 1500.
[…]
I’m making a database of the books I’m choosing to show why I’ve selected them, so which criteria they fulfil as well as explaining why that particular volume is exciting. I’ll be blogging about some of the most exciting things I find. For now, I’ll have to go to the rare books room at the Wellcome library to take my own photos, but once this project is complete, you’ll be able to read the selected books online for free.”
Finding a third way to open access | Research Information
“Entrenched viewpoints on both sides of the open access debate risk leaving authors stuck in no man’s land, argues Rob Johnson….In politics, the ‘third way’ emerged as a synthesis of right-wing economics and left-wing social policies. Perhaps it’s time for us to embrace a ‘third way to OA’ – enabling us to harness the dynamism of commercial players in the interests of opening up research findings to the world.“
Open and Shut?: The Open Access Interviews: Rusty Speidel, The Center for Open Science
“The Center for Open Science (COS) has announced today that six new preprint services have launched using COS’ preprints platform, taking the number of such services to 14.
The announcement comes at a time when we are seeing a rising tide of preprint servers being launched, both by for-profit and non-profit organisations – a development all the more remarkable given scholarly publishers’ historic opposition to preprint servers. Indeed, so antagonistic to such services have publishers been that until recently they were often able to stop them in their tracks. “
The Journal Publishing Market Between Supply- and Demand-Side Models: The Case of Open Access in Germany | Open Science
Open-Access Platforms Are Key to Research Libraries’ Core Mission – Letters – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education
” … we were pleased to see the Center for Open Science (COS) and its Open Science Framework (OSF) highlighted in your article as a public goods infrastructure alternative to commercial, proprietary platforms. The Association of Research Libraries has been working in partnership with COS for several years on a project called SHARE, a free, openly accessible database of metadata describing both research product and process. Simply put, platforms and business arrangements that lock in scholarly content and data about scholarly process make stewardship of that content — research libraries’ core mission—impossible. By working with scholars to adopt and invest in open platforms like the OSF and SHARE, librarians can provide their expertise in data management, metadata standards, and preservation, and ensure that the resulting data and publications can be made accessible over the long term.”