Open and Shut?: The OA Interviews: Jeffrey Beall, University of Colorado Denver

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-07-12

Summary:

Use the link to access the transcript of the interview introduces as follows: “ In 2004 the scholarly publisher Elsevier made a written submission to the UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee. Elsevier asserted that the traditional model used to publish research papers — where readers, and institutions like libraries, pay the costs of producing scholarly journals through subscriptions — ‘ensures high quality, independent peer review and prevents commercial interests from influencing decisions to publish.’ Elsevier added that moving to the Open Access (OA) publishing model ... would remove ‘this critical control measure’ from scholarly publishing. The problem with adopting the gold OA model, explained Elsevier, is that publishers' revenues would then be driven entirely by the number of articles published. As such, OA publishers would be ‘under continual pressure to increase output, potentially at the expense of quality.’ This is no longer a viewpoint that Elsevier promulgates. Speaking to me earlier this year, for instance, Elsevier’s Director of Universal Access Alicia Wise said, ‘Today open access journals do generally contain high-quality peer reviewed content... Good work in this area by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) has helped to establish quality standards for open access publications. For several years now Elsevier has taken a positive test-and-learn approach to open access and believes that open access publishing can be both of a high quality and sustainable...’ Elsevier’s 2004 warning was nevertheless prescient. No one knows this better than Jeffrey Beall, a metadata librarian at the University of Colorado Denver. Beall maintains a list of what he calls ‘predatory publishers’. That is, publishers who, as Beall puts it, ‘unprofessionally exploit the gold open-access model for their own profit.’ Amongst other things, this can mean that papers are subjected to little or no peer review before they are published. Currently, Beall’s blog list of ‘predatory publishers’ lists over 100 separate companies, and 38 independent journals. And the list is growing by 3 to 4 new publishers each week. Beall’s opening salvo against predatory publishers came in 2009, when he publisheda review of the OA publisher Bentham Open for The Charleston Advisor. Since then, he has written further articles on the topic (e.g. here), and has been featured twice in The Chronicle of Higher Education (here and here)... As he puts it, ‘I am dismayed that most discussions of gold open-access fail to include the quality problems I have documented. Too many OA commenters look only at the theory and ignore the practice. We must ‘maintain the integrity of the academic record’, and I am doubtful that gold open-access is the best long-term way to accomplish that.’ When presented with evidence of predatory publishing, OA advocates often respond by saying that most OA journals do not actually charge a processing fee.  But as commercial subscription publishers increasingly enter the OA market it would be naïve to think that the number of journals that charge APCs will not grow exponentially in the coming years... However, if Beall’s growing list is anything to go by, the omens are not currently very good. Moreover, if it turns out that there is indeed an inherent flaw in the gold OA model — as Elsevier once claimed — then the research community would appear to have a long-term problem.”

Link:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/oa-interviews-jeffrey-beall-university.html?spref=tw

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.elsevier oa.libraries oa.peer_review oa.costs oa.quality oa.librarians oa.fees oa.bealls_list oa.cope oa.oaspa oa.u.colorado oa.journals

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

07/12/2012, 15:22

Date published:

07/12/2012, 16:05