We use the term “predatory” cautiously, primarily in an attempt to initially categorize a certain class of Open-Access scholarly publishers with like characteristics. These publishers are predatory because their mission is not to promote, preserve, and make available scholarship; instead, their mission is to exploit the author-pays, Open-Access model for their own profit.
Advisor reviews––Comparative Reviews
“Predatory” Open-Access Scholarly Publishers
April 2010
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cac ... PM-itCo7ng
See article for profiles of the 9 publishers which are:Editor’s Note: This unique comparative review provides a broad overview of nine different Open-Access publishers that use the “author pays” model for supporting their publishing efforts. The same author published a review of Bentham Open (which uses the same publishing model) in the July 2009 issue of The Charleston Advisor and he recommended an analysis of some of the other major players. Since so many publishers are covered in this single article, it is necessary to keep the profiling for each publisher to a reasonable length. However, we believe that seeing such an overview in a single article is very useful.
Scoring: The pricing scores given in the composite score boxes relate to the fees the authors pay upon publication of their manuscripts, and the contract options refer to the license under which the articles are published.
Pricing Options
Each of the publishers reviewed in this article is Open Access and each uses the “author pays” model to support the publication of the journals. The prices described here are the charges an author pays
upon publication of a manuscript. Several publishers, including Academic Journals, Inc. and Knowledgia Review, also make available print subscriptions to their online, Open-Access journals, but this re-
view examines only the publishers’ Open-Access products. We sent an inquiry to each of the publishers that does not state the fee on its Web site and asked for information about fees; none responded.
Academic Journals
Academic Journals, Inc
ANSINetswork
Dove Press
Insight Knowledge
Knowledgia Review
Libertas Academia
Science Publications
Scientific Journals International
fixed typosCritical evaluation
All the publishers covered in this review fall into the category called gold Open Access. In gold Open Access “the author or author institution can pay a fee to the publisher at publication time, the publisher thereafter making the material available ‘free’ at the point of access.”4 This model is often called the “author pays” model of Open Access. Publishers like the ones we review here are beginning to be the object of much criticism. Stevan Harnad explains, “There seems to be a growing epidemic of fast Gold-OA journal-fleet start-ups, based on next to no scholarly/scientific or publishing experience or expertise, and relying heavily on online spamming.”5 Proponents of Open Access are beginning to realize that these “predatory,” Open Access publishers are giving the Open Access movement a bad name.
We use the term “predatory” cautiously, primarily in an attempt to initially categorize a certain class of Open-Access scholarly publishers with like characteristics. These publishers are predatory because their mission is not to promote, preserve, and make available scholarship; instead, their mission is to exploit the author-pays, Open-Access model for their own profit.
They work by spamming scholarly e-mail lists, with calls for papers and invitations to serve on nominal editorial boards. If you subscribe to any professional e-mail lists, you likely have received some of
these solicitations.
Also, these publishers typically provide little or no peer-review. In fact, in most cases, their peer review process is a façade. None of these publishers mentions digital preservation. Indeed, any of these publishers could disappear at a moment’s notice, resulting in the loss of its content. While we were researching this review, one publisher, Academic Journals, was hacked and the site replaced with radical Islamic propaganda for about a week.
Why would authors pay to have an article published when there are so many free outlets where they could publish, including free Open-Access journals? In many cases, the answer is that the quality of the articles is poor, and they were rejected by the mainstream journals.
The unscrupulous publishers we describe in this review provide an outlet for substandard research. Harnad explains,
A high proportion of Gold OA journals are lesser journals. I
don’t want to make it sound elitist, but they are not the journals
that contain the research that everybody wants and needs the
most. If you look at the top journals, the ones that are likely to
capture 80% of citations, most of those are not Gold OA.”6
It is very easy to set up an Open-Access publishing Web site. An example is the Insight Knowledge site. It is a startup and has no content and could have been set up in a day. Predatory publishers use words
such as “Academic” and “Scientific” in their names to falsely add a veneer of legitimacy to their business.
Practices such as these, according to Harnad, “are now being taken to a grotesque extreme because
of the ease of entry into online publishing and a perceived instability in the traditional journal publishing trade, owing to the growing clamor for OA.”7
The gold Open-Access movement is moving the burden of paying for scholarly publishing from libraries to authors and to the funding agencies, including governmental agencies, that support
scientists’ research. Moreover, the gold Open-Access publishing industry is being tainted by a perfidious group of fast and loose upstart publishers who exploit these funding agencies for their own profit,
agencies that are all too willing to pay the author fees.
There is an organization for Open-Access, scholarly publishers, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, http://www.oaspa.org. With the exception of Dove Press, none of the publishers de-
scribed in this review is a member. The organization has a member code of conduct that lists ethical standards for OA publishers.8 These standards insist on clear contact information on the publisher’s site,
require that all articles undergo peer-review, that journals have editors and editorial boards made up of recognized experts in the field, that fees are clearly stated, that any direct marketing is appropriate and
unobtrusive, and that license information is clearly stated. All of the publishers described in this review fail to meet one or more of these basic ethical standards.
Finally, one of the negative impacts of these predatory Open-Access publishers will be the avalanche of journal articles they are creating. This abundance will make it harder for scholars to keep up with re-
search in their fields, and it will cause online searches to be filled up with links to low-quality research.
According to Philippe Baveye, “… one of the key components of the academic serials crisis is the
unbridled proliferation of journal articles, which seems about to get even more out of hand than it already is … .”9 Libraries and scholarly indexes need to decide how to handle the output from these publishers. Should all research be indexed and promoted in library databases, or should librarians and scholarly indexes deselect low quality, Open-Access journals?
changed colors
