On the dangers of SciHub and hybrid journals | SciELO in Perspective

"The scientific world is a complex world, getting ever more complex, and there are many dangers lurking in the thickets of the ‘ego-system’ of scientific communication, particularly where it involves publishing in journals. Let me focus on just two of them, currently being discussed widely. First, there is SciHub, seen as presenting a danger to traditional, copyright-dependent subscription journal publishers. And secondly, there is the phenomenon of hybrid journals, which combine open access content with subscription content, seen as a danger by many researchers. I am not denying that SciHub may present potential dangers to subscription publishers; they’re obvious, but largely hypothetical and thus not very serious. As long as copyright infringements are illegal and subscription publishers keep saying that, there will be very few, if any, librarians who would consider cancelling subscriptions as a result of SciHub. It is nothing but wishful thinking if you believe they would. The potential danger of SciHub lies somewhere else. SciHub may significantly delay the reform science communication needs and that is underway with the development of structural, born-open access (as opposed to accidental, incidental, temporary, or derivative open access, such as found, for instance, in repositories or as publishers’ marketing gimmicks) ... Secondly, there is the phenomenon of so-called ‘hybrid’ journals. It’s a somewhat older phenomenon than SciHub, but the dangers of the concept of a hybrid journal have been becoming clearer of late. Hybrid journals are often seen as dangerous, as they are suspected of ‘double-dipping’ (American slang for 'obtaining an income from two different sources, typically in an illicit way'1). They may, or they may not, but just publishing hybrid journals doesn’t mean the publisher is double-dipping. Here again, the real problem lies somewhere else. It is a peculiarity of the scientific community that publishing, especially publishing in any particular peer reviewed journal, is primarily done for career reasons: its progression, establishment or consolidation and the like. Notions such as approbation, certification, quality assessment, are often mentioned, but it all comes down to scientific knowledge exchange and communication taking second place. How is this relevant to the dangers hybrid journals pose? Well, hybrid journals are typically subscription journals in origin, building a reputation for years or decades, or even longer, that recently started to offer open access for articles published in them, directly upon publication, as long as authors or their funders pay a fee, often called APC (Article Processing Charge). These APCs are typically quite high; as high, in fact, as the average level of per-article income the journal is used to receive ..."