The Downside of Open-Access Publishing — NEJM

Over the past couple of years, many people involved in scientific research and publishing have received increasing numbers of emails with invitations to submit papers to newly established journals, join their editorial boards, or even apply to serve as their editors-in-chief. Personally, I have been alternately amused and annoyed by these messages. A glance at the journal's name or the associated website has told me that these simply are not serious publications. But the establishment of new journals and publishers at a rapidly increasing pace should be taken seriously, since it affects the scientific record as a whole ... The introduction, a decade ago, of an open-access model in which authors pay to have their work published offered an alternative way of financing this quality control. But it also opened up opportunities to charge authors a fee to publish their papers with little or no quality control.  Jeffrey Beall, an academic librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, who is interested in scholarly open-access publishing, calls its more questionable incarnations 'predatory.'1 'Predatory, open-access publishers,' he writes on his blog, Scholarly Open Access (http://scholarlyoa.com), 'are those that unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit. Typically, these publishers spam professional email lists, broadly soliciting article submissions for the clear purpose of gaining additional income. Operating essentially as vanity presses, these publishers typically have a low article acceptance threshold, with a false-front or non-existent peer review process. Unlike professional publishing operations, whether subscription-based or ethically-sound open access, these predatory publishers add little value to scholarship, pay little attention to digital preservation, and operate using fly-by-night, unsustainable business models.'  Beall is not the first person to ask whether the author-pays model can be exploited. Ever since it was introduced, questions have been raised about the possibility that publishers would be tempted to lower their editorial standards to attract authors who would be happy to see their work published quickly and without too much scrutiny. But Beall has now compiled a list of publishers and journals that he finds questionable and is encouraging discussion in the scientific community about these entities and the criteria that one might use to identify them.2  Whether it's fair to classify all these journals and publishers as 'predatory' is an open question — several shades of gray may be distinguishable. Some of the publishers are intentionally misleading, naming nonexistent people as their editors and editorial board members and claiming ownership of articles that they have plagiarized from other publications. Other journals and publishers on Beall's list may be real, though it's obvious that the people running them are not very professional, and some of the publications may have been created simply because it seemed like a clever business scheme to collect author fees of several hundred dollars apiece to post papers in a journal-like layout at a fraction of the traditional price. Viewed in some lights, such enterprises may not be unethical: thousands of researchers worldwide need to publish, and not all of them can do so in the highest-ranked journals. But it is surely problematic for journals and publishers to pretend to be something they aren't, misleading authors, readers, and the scientific community at large ..."