Predatory Open Access: Part 2 – Peer Review in OA and Ethics of “Sting Op Research” | Scepticemia

"Ever since the Science article about a sting operation to reveal the murky business that goes on in the name of Open Access journals came out, the academic world has been thrown into a tizzy. I decided to do a series of posts exploring the issue of predatory open access and the issues surrounding them. The first post in this series can be found here: Predatory Open Access: Part I – A Sting Op and Indictment of the OA Model. In the first post I reflected on the article and its fall outs. In the present article I try to talk about the issue of peer review in OA journals and whether it was an ethical breach on behalf of the Science sting operation authors to carry out a falsified study ... The objection that is usually placed is that the author-payment model will corrupt the peer review system as the journal will try to accept and publish as many articles as possible in order to boost revenues. With most of the open access journals being published online, the issue of space and page constraints are also gone. These two come together, and bolster the fear that open access model is a faltering one, a get rich quick scheme, an internet-based money-for-academic-fame game.  However, as Peter Suber has pointed out somewhere else, this issue does not really hold much water. The journals that seek to publish anything and everything to keep up their revenues, will eventually become black listed in the academic circles because of their poor quality control; and submissions will decrease, causing loss of articles and revenues. While one may argue that some fly-by-night journals may just be doing this very thing in order to make a quick buck off the scholarly publishing market and then vanish from the mainstream, to be relegated to B-grade levels, scrounging off the bottom (or maybe even disappear altogether!). That is not a weakness in the OA model; just as industry sponsored paper pushing is not a weakness (although it is a frowned-upon practice) in traditional, pay-walled journals ..."