Open access and the predatory threat

This article has been published in Thesis (LEO magazine) – Summer Edition 2013. For a link to read the article in the magazine, go here.
A “Call for Editorial Board Members, Reviewers and Papers” from the Science Publishing Group or a “Call for Papers: Special Issue ‘Metrics in Publishing’” from Wanda Gruetter are just two of the tens of emails Thed van Leeuwen (Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University) receives each week that invite him to submit a paper to a journal or conference. When one looks into these publishers a little bit more, their websites often appear to be quite amateurish, their command of English to be not very good, and their names sometimes to bear a striking resemblance to well-known publishers (Science Publishing Group seems to be a contraction of the journal Science and the Nature Publishing Group, whereas the name Wanda Gruetter is highly similar to the publisher Walter de Gruyter). All of these publishers indicate the articles they publish are open access. In fact, these are instances of “predatory” open access (predatory OA) publishers. To find out the effects of predatory OA on scientific publishing and research, we have interviewed an expert on predatory publishing, a publisher responsible for open access at Oxford University Press, and a researcher from the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) who inadvertently ran into a predatory OA publisher when publishing a paper.
What are predatory open access publishers and how do they work?
In traditional scientific publishing, readers (or their universities) have to pay for a subscription to scientific journals. Conversely, open access publishing works by having authors pay a fee to have their paper freely available in a journal for the public to read. This fee is used to cover the costs of a high-quality peer review (while preferably also providing the publisher with a profit).
Predatory publishers take advantage of open access by publishing papers after light or no peer review, while still incurring author fees. Deceit about the amount of fees authors have to pay is not uncommon. Jeffrey Beall, a university librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, runs a blog about the phenomenon and manages a list of publishers he considers predatory. He describes a typical example of the mode of operation of these publishers: “A few publishers have discovered a very successful strategy for getting authors to submit manuscripts: personalized spam. To do this, they examine papers already published by other publishers. Next they compose an email to the first author, praising the earlier article and inviting them to submit another manuscript on the same topic. In this email the article processing charge is usually not mentioned. This strategy is very, very effective.”  This is a strategy Rhodri Jackson, senior publisher Law Journals and Oxford Open at Oxford University Press, is familiar with. “I had the case with one of my law journals a couple of years ago. Every author who’d published in that journal got an email from a publisher, and that publisher had basically harvested the emails of our authors from the website. They sent [an email] that […] had the details of the journal their paper was published in, the title of the paper, [and] their email address. They said in the email that my journal had passed their information to them and that now, they could also publish in their journal for a small fee. Obviously, we never would have passed their details onto another journal to publish in that journal as well. They were using our journal’s good name to instantly give themselves credibility without our permission.”

Recognizing predatory publishers

So how to recognize predatory publishers? Jeffrey Beall: “First, consult my lists. Consult with senior colleagues who are familiar with the best and worst journals in a given field. Examine articles previously published by the publisher and judge their quality. Ask yourself whether you would want your article to appear alongside one of those articles. Look for any practices that seem non-standard or that show any attempt at being non-transparent or deceptive. Does the publisher lie about or hide its location? Does the publisher clearly state its author fees? Does it use spam or personalized spam to solicit editorial board memberships and manuscripts?” Rhodri Jackson suggests looking at the website of the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), of which he is a board member: “[To the best of my knowledge], all of the significant good open access publishers are OASPA members.” He also suggests looking at the editorial board and checking the quality of the website to make sure the publisher looks legitimate.
These last two suggestions alone are not a foolproof method. A researcher from the Leiden University Medical Centre once published an article in a journal of a publisher that appears on Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory publishers. “We found this journal by googling for journals with names that relate to our field and by the name of the journal it was a very appropriate choice for this particular manuscript. Then we looked at the website. It was not overly convincing, but it was not a particularly novel manuscript, so we were just happy to have it published somewhere. […] Then we looked at the editorial board of this particular journal and it was quite impressive. […] That was the key factor that convinced us that this is a proper journal, because the editorial board was well-composed, covering all the different expertises in the field. […] We had only one peer review. […] It was not the most thorough review that we’ve ever had, but at least they had read the manuscript and seemed to understand the content […].” Only after the manuscript had been accepted and the handling of the manuscript was transferred from the editor to the publisher did he notice something was amiss. “The publisher was very insistent on getting the payment. I think we received three reminders within a week or so, even though I had already asked our [financial manager] to transfer the money for the open access. That was different from all the other [open access] journals we’ve published in […]. They are usually not [that] aggressive. […] That was the point where we realized something was a little bit different and that [this publisher] is clearly in the business to make money. It’s also clear from the very wide range of journals they have and [the fact that] many of them have very few and irregular publications. So in retrospect, it’s likely that this journal can be classified as a predatory journal.” Does the researcher regret publishing a paper in this journal? “No, it’s a good experience and now we know what we talk about when we talk about predatory open access journals. So no, I don’t regret it and […] there are many other good groups that have also published in the same journal, including the groups from the people in the editorial board.”

Effect on open access publishing and research

The emergence of predatory open access publishers raises the question whether these publishers are damaging open access publishing in general. Rhodri Jackson: “Less so now than it was ten years ago, or five years ago even. I think in what you might call the traditional publishing industry you have all of the major publishers, like Elsevier, Springer and Wiley quite prominently also publishing open access now. […] You also have open access being mandated by government funding bodies in the UK, so open access is pretty established now. [So] while they’re certainly not a good thing, I can’t see [predatory open access publishers] being that damaging to the development anymore.” The LUMC researcher agrees that predatory publishers are not damaging to established publishers and journals, but thinks they are to new open access journals “with good intentions”: “Especially […] the new open access journals [are struggling] to advertise, because if they advertise too much, they will be suspected [of] being predatory, so that makes their job much more difficult, I think.” Jeffrey Beall takes a much harder stance on the vitality of open access publishing: “The [author-pays, open-access] model carries a built-in conflict of interest, for the more papers a publishing company accepts, the more money it makes. The author-pays, open-access model was never a good idea in the first place because it doesn’t work well in all disciplines, threatens scholarly societies in the social sciences and humanities, and creates the consequence of predatory publishers appearing and exploiting the model so prolifically. Not only has predatory publishing damaged open-access publishing, it has also damaged online publishing in general.”
Beall also sees a danger for science itself due to “the high amount of author misconduct, such as plagiarism” in predatory journals and the fact many of these journals “perform a fake, insufficient, or non-existent peer review, much non-science is being published bearing science’s seal of approval. This is problematic because science is cumulative – new research builds on published research. We are seeing predatory journals being cited in respectable journals, but the predatory journals may not have conducted a valid peer review.” He concludes by saying: “This will certainly have a very negative effect on research.”
An interesting question is whether open access publishing will continue to exist as an important method of scholarly communication, be changed back to a subscription-based model, or even be replaced by a new method of knowledge dissemination. Beall: “The market will ultimately determine which model is successful. I think the successful model will be one that focuses on readers rather than authors, for readers are the true consumers of research.”

More information

Jeffrey Beall’s blog: http://scholarlyoa.com/
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association: http://oaspa.org/
Guidelines to open access publishing from the Leiden University Library: http://library.leiden.edu/education-research/copyright-information-office/authors/publishers-and-open-access.html