The Fraud of Open Access Publishing

An argument in support of the open access charge is that commercial houses, who now seem to have near-monopoly in scholarly research publications, have to earn profits to keep them in their business. Many of the academic societies and universities, which publish scholarly journals, have also joined the bandwagon to charge authors for ‘open access’. It is not convincing that the hefty ‘open access’ charges that authors pay for publishing their results meet only the actual cost: the profit margins enjoyed by the publishers seem to be unreasonably high. As the Editor-in-Chief of the Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy, I have estimated the average cost per published article in hard and softcopy formats of this journal to be less than US$ 500. This journal is published in hard-copy besides being freely accessible through the net and does not levy any page or color or open access charges to authors. This cost is less than 15-20% of the costs of publication publicly announced by some of the open access journals started by academic bodies (Patterson and McLennan, 2016). It appears, therefore, that many of the open access publishers make good money while the authors’ pockets get lighter! As I have argued earlier (Lakhotia, 2014a), the academies, leaned societies and universities have societal responsibility to bring out scholarly journals on a no-profit basis so that they remain within the reach of all researchers, irrespective of their research funding. The present ‘open access’ model works against researchers from less-endowed institutions, irrespective of the quality of their research output (Gadagkar, 2008; Gadagkar, 2016).

Another, and more sinister, consequence of the ‘open access’ model is the appearance of an unusually large number of predatory journals and predatory publishers (Beall, 2012, 2013; Lakhotia, 2015) that publish ‘anything’ for a fee (Bohannon, 2013), which is often negotiable depending upon the purchasing power of the author. Apparently, there are many who need to publish ‘something’ to ‘improve’ their academic profile and the predatory publishers make good money by capitalizing on this need (Lakhotia, 2015). Such authors do not want to go through the peer-review process and find the ‘pay- and-publish’ practice very convenient. The ‘more-the-merrier’ scenario for assessment of quality of research has fuelled the mush-rooming of open access predatory journals across the globe, especially more so in India.

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We need to urgently curb the common practice of quantification of research output through some arithmetic numbers as this promotes the ‘publish-orperish’ scenario, the root cause for such unethical conditions. Together, such practices have denied the serious researchers the pleasure of publication of novel findings (Lakhotia, 2014b)."