The Challenge Arising From Open Access

"In 1998, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiated the requirement that publications coming from NIH-funded studies be made freely available to the public through the open-access platform at the National Library of Medicine (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/). Countries throughout the world have a similar requirement. This requirement was designed to advance the translation of new knowledge to research and practice because most journals were only available through subscription, academic libraries, or professional organization memberships. Many publishers have an open-access mechanism to accommodate researchers’ interest in publishing in an open-access form for a fee. Sage, the publisher of The Journal of School Nursing (JOSN), offers open access to authors through Sage Choice (http://www.sagepub.com/sagechoice.sp). Additionally there are a number of reputable open-access journals such as PloS One and BioMed Central. The fees for open access are the responsibility of the author, and while some authors receive support for open-access publishing from funding agencies, many do not receive sufficient funding to cover the open-access costs (Broome, 2014). The advancement of open access has spawned a new business model of open-access journals that consists of a number of journals with predatory practices. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, reported on the practice of predatory publishing in open access journals at the International Academy of Nursing Editors (INANE) Annual Meeting in August 2014. He developed criteria to identify predatory publishing (Beall, 2013) and maintains a list of open-access journals meeting the criteria (http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/). Subsequent to Beall’s presentation, a project was instituted between INANE and Nurse Author & Editor at the 2014 meeting (INANE Predatory Publishing Practices Colaborative, 2014). The purpose of the project was to call on nursing editors globally to raise awareness of predatory publishing. Journals using predatory practices offer, for a fee, extremely fast publication of manuscripts that have questionable peer review. Typically, editors of these journals are not experts in the field, nor do they have professional editorial boards. The journals do not have membership in the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE; http://publicationethics.org/) or in the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE; http://www.icmje.org/about-icmje/). The predatory publishers often have the same editor for multiple journals and construct journal titles designed to entice authors such as the Journal of Nursing, Business and Technology (Pickler et al., 2014). Impact factors that are reported may not be verifiable in the Journal Citation Reports (http://thomsonreuters.com/journal-citation-reports/). Why is the emergence of predatory publishing important to authors, reviewers, and readers of The JOSN? ..."