Some Research Wants to Be Free, Some Follows the Money: Bogus Journals Complicate the Open Access Movement

"Despite the appeal of Stewart Brand's rallying cry 'information wants to be free,'1 the ambiguities of that key term free have long fostered confusion. Does information gravitate toward freedom in the sense of free beer or a free lunch, raising the obvious objection that there is no such thing? The costs of generating and distributing information must be recovered somewhere. Or does freedom in the sense of free speech, unfettered by official censorship, steep access costs, or other artificial constraints, better suit the purposes of scientific communication? Digital distribution has reduced economic bottlenecks in the circulation of research findings and allowed the creation of various structures that offer open access (OA) publication. The Public Library of Science (PLoS), offering 7 peer-reviewed and professionally respected journals (including PLoS One, which has become active in emergency medical research2), is the best known of the OA entities that have arisen since World Wide Web access reached the general public in the early 1990s. Others include Biomed Central; the British Medical Journal (for research articles, not full content) and its BMJ Open offshoot; Hindawi, a large Cairo-based publisher that has courted controversy but meets most experts' credibility criteria, and that converted all its journals to OA by 2007; and Paul Ginsparg's arXiv.org, which has made self-archiving the norm in physics and commonplace in related disciplines. Supported by assorted mechanisms, including author fees, institutional subsidies, and voluntary or mandatory pay wall–free archiving, OA publishing represents a dramatic step toward an environment in which research information resembles Peter Cooper's ideal of education as a public good, 'as free as air or water,' rather than a commodity that can be bought, sold, and restricted to those with the ability to pay. Perhaps inevitably, note observers of the OA movement, enterprises with a sharper eye for authors' wallets than for readers' interests have launched journals that accept practically any article for a fee, perform little or no peer review, and threaten to dilute the credibility of the OA scientific literature, at least in the eyes of the unwary. These on going concerns play on the unfamiliarity of many journals outside specialized communities and the economies of scale inherent in online publishing. The pay-to-publish operations are numerous enough—and enough of a nuisance to researchers, tenure and promotion committees, and scientific communication specialists—to have provoked a watchdog response.3 The flood tide of suspect publications and related conferences, amounting to 'a parallel world of pseudo-academia,' came to the general public's attention last spring through a New York Times article.4 The openness of the digital realm attracts both high- and low-quality material; as standards evolve, it is anyone's guess which category will dominate online scientific reporting. OA has the potential to expand and transform scholarly publishing, its proponents contend,5, 6, 7, 8, 9 broadening access while maintaining standards through scrupulous peer review. The practice has spread to major subscription publishers as well: Elsevier (Annals of Emergency Medicine's own publisher), Taylor & Francis, John Wiley, and others allow OA to individual articles in perpetuity for a fee, an arrangement known as hybrid OA. Some commentators describe OA as not only a reaction to soaring subscription prices but also nothing less than the future of scientific communication. Yet the movement's quality control mechanisms are under attack during a critical stage in the formation of its institutions and their broader acceptance as a credible alternative to subscription publishing ... Jeffrey Beall, scholarly initiatives librarian and associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver's Auraria Library, became concerned about the proliferation of enterprises that he has termed “predatory publishers” while serving as the editor of the Journal of Library Metadata, when he noticed increasing amounts of spam e-mail inviting submissions and positions on editorial boards, often for journals of dubious relevance to his work. He began collecting names of author-fee-supported publishers engaging in these and other questionable practices, posting them on his blog Scholarly Open Access and advising researchers and others to avoid doing business with them. “The scientific article market is flooded with these low-quality journals, many of which haven't gone through an honest peer review,” Beall commented. 'They're just polluting scholarly communication.'  Beall's list has grown from a small personal project to a more structured instrument with a comments section, publicly posted inclusion criteria,10 and a formal appeal process allowing publishers to rebut the contention that their journals have earned this badge of