To publish open access or not… | Population and Environment in the Middle East

" ... There is, as always, a catch with open access publishing. Instead of paying to access the papers, you pay to publish them. This is fine if it is just a matter of when the money is paid, but it also affects the 'market'. If you pay to access papers, it is in the publishers interest to publish interesting papers that attract a lot of downloads and citations. If you pay to publish a paper, it will be in the publisher’s interest to publish many papers. This means that even though a paper is flawed, the publisher will earn more money by accepting the paper than rejecting it, at least in the short run. The effect of this has been seen in so-called 'predatory publishers' whose sole purpose is to make money by charging authors for publishing their work. Sometimes extra fees apply that are not even announced until the paper is accepted, forcing researchers to either go through the review process again, or to pay the additional publication fees. Fortunately, there is a list of 'questionable publishers' at the Scolarly Open Access blog by Jeffrey Beall, where you can search for journals and publishers that you have planned to publish with. A quick overview of this list shows many publishers that I get tons of e-mails with publication offers from. I also find the publisher of a journal that I did my first reviewer assignment for, which I now get weekly requests to review for. The sad part is that while I recommended rejecting the paper due to plagiarism, they published a slightly improved version. All open access journals and publishers are, however, not bad, and the idea of open access is actually appealing since it allows access to more people. This is also good for the researcher who has a higher chance of being read and cited if more people can access their papers. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) aims to provide a comprehensive directory of open access journals that use a quality control system. The journals included in this directory should therefore be ok to publish in, but there have been some overlap between the list of questionable publishers (link in previous paragraph) and the DOAJ. There is also often a 'publish open access' option for 'regular' journals, which is a decision you make after you have been accepted. This means that the publisher has no economic interest in publishing your particular paper, but that is of course easier when they already have a stable income from subscription fees paid by universities. So where does that leave us? Should we publish open access? I believe in the free flow of information, and I think that if universities are paying for access to journals, they could instead pay for the publication of papers. Preferably to journals that are not connected to a multinational corporation. At Lund University, there is a fund for publishing Open Access, where 50% of the fee is paid by this fund, and the rest needs to come from other sources, preferably the research project. The journals, however, need to meet some criteria, for example they need to be part of this list of Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. or at least live up to their code of conduct (however that is evaluated) ..."