The Robber Barons of Open Access Publishing | Mittelalter

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-06-18

Summary:

"Non-transparency, double standards, long wait. Facing this accumulated unpleasantness, the subject of debate, almost certainly, is the so-called double blind peer review. Given a plethora of critical and less critical considerations throughout academia, there is no need to rehash all the pros and cons here; neither do I want to make a general statement on digital humanities or digital medieval studies.[1] Indisputably, a thorough peer review is capable of improving any scholarly article, and even a rejection does not necessarily put an end to attempts at publishing a specific paper. However, at a time when scholars are advised to publish in so-called high-impact journals only, in order to collect research points to get more money and better positions, ‘peer review’ has grown to the ultimate advertising slogan for any journal in vague fear of losing relevance ... In recent times, born-digital open access journals have become an alternative to handle this quantity: they are often less cleaved to the traditional restrictions of printed media, and open minded towards new types of peer review such as open peer commentary. Given the undeniable enrichment of medieval studies through such journals, what is the purpose of my brief contribution? Most medievalists, I assume, have subscribed to several newsfeeds, providing them with updates on virtually any topic within the field, including calls not only for papers, but also for reviewing and editing start-up journals. Some of these offers are quite tempting — all journals have started from scratch. Yet, all is not gold that has key words such as ‘humanities’, ‘digital’ or ‘medieval’ in its title.  Occupying a popular term of medievalism and social criticism, I want to draw medievalists’ awareness to the growing number of twenty-first century robber barons on the publishing road. Being a global phenomenon, the problem of so-called predatory open access journals is already well-aware at many universities and research facilities,[2] but, as far as I can see, still somewhat neglected (at least) within German academia. What is it all about?  ..."

Link:

https://mittelalter.hypotheses.org/6260

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.quality oa.credibility oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.gold oa.fees oa.prestige oa.impact oa.peer_review oa.humanities oa.digitial_humanities oa.ssh oa.journals

Date tagged:

06/18/2015, 08:57

Date published:

06/18/2015, 04:57