Lions and tiger and bears, OA, or, scaring the children, part 1 | Scholarly Communications @ Duke

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-06-04

Summary:

Earlier this week I had the delicate task of replying to a researcher who had applied for funding for open access publication fees and telling her that our COPE fund could not be used to support her article.  The reason was that it was to be published in a journal that did not meet two of our basic criteria.  In order to ensure that our limited funds are well-spent, we will only fund article processing fees for journals that are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals and published by members of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.  These criteria may be imperfect surrogates for quality, but they have served us well in striving to be sure that we support high-quality, sustainable OA publishing efforts. Because we have these criteria, there was an objective reason for our decision to deny this particular application, since the journal did not meet either of the requirements I just mentioned.  But I felt obligated to say more, so I forwarded the researcher a link to a discussion of whether or not the publisher in question was a 'predatory' OA operation.  The concerns were real, although the article did not ultimately decide whether the problems it listed were the result of an awkward start up or intentional deception.  I told the researcher that she might consider a different venue, and I worried about her reply because I had been rather pushy, I thought. The reply I received was both a relief and a surprise.  The researcher thanked me for my concern, said that she understood the decision about funding, and clearly indicated her intention to proceed with the publication as planned.  Her response got me thinking about the whole notion of predatory open access publishing.  How, I wondered, should libraries especially, when they administer OA funds, think about the predatory problem? First, I think libraries are right to raise the issue.  We have always had a role in helping students and even faculty evaluate the quality of various publications, and doing so is an obligation when we are making purchase or other funding decisions, since we are obligated to spend carefully the funds our institutions entrust to us.  I really like the warning, couched in a modest and restrained tone, found in this blog post the University of Buffalo Libraries.  We should not be condemning all open access publishing, or otherwise shouting about the predators all around us, but we do need to answer inquiries honestly and spend our monies wisely. Which brings me to a second reflection.  'Predatory' publishing is not exclusively an open access problem, and the problems included in that over-used phrase actually run the gamut from genuine attempts to defraud people to simple mismanagement.  Before there were OA journals there were journals published in traditional fashion that were merely shills for certain industries or which otherwise had unacknowledged selection criteria that conflicted with scholarly quality.  The victims of these types of journals were unwary libraries, who purchased subscriptions that ultimately ill-served their patrons and wasted scarce resources. In an online age, criteria that are well-established in libraries for avoiding these predatory toll-access journals now must be shared more widely because researchers may unwittingly spend research funds on equally low-quality OA journals.  But to call this an open access problem is to blind ourselves to its full scope and is, I fear, often motivated more by the desire to bring OA itself into disrepute, to 'scare the children,' as I like to call it, than it is by a desire to protect the entire system of scholarly communications.  We should not allow FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt), which is often spread by institutions that are trying to preserve the problem to which they see themselves as the solution (to paraphrase Clay Shirky), to narrow our vision of a sustainable system of scholarly publishing.  The problem we  should be addressing is predatory publications, OA and subscription-based, and publishing ethics across the board ..."

Link:

http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/06/28/lions-and-tiger-and-bears-oa-or-scaring-the-children-part-1/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.universities oa.libraries oa.quality oa.librarians oa.funds oa.bealls_list oa.doaj oa.misunderstandings oa.cope oa.credibility oa.oaspa oa.colleges oa.predatory oa.hei oa.journals

Date tagged:

06/04/2013, 07:28

Date published:

06/04/2013, 03:28