Open Access Publishing

Based upon a comment to another post, PG refreshed his high-level knowledge of open-access academic journals.

From The Lloyd Sealy Library at The City University of New York:

Peter Suber has written extensively about open access,

“Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free
of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing
restrictions.”

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) ‘s definition:

“Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.”

. . . .

Open access (OA) can be green, gold, gratis or libre. Green OA refers to authors’ self archiving their work on their own web or social media site, in their institution’s repository, or in a discipline based repository.  Gold OA refers to an article that is freely accessible on the journal’s website; the journal may be fully open access, or a hybrid with some articles freely available and others behind a paywall. Gratis open access articles can be accessed by anyone without any monetary charge.  Libre open access articles may be accessed and re-used without restrictions.

. . . .

The BBB Declarations; Budapest, Berlin, Bethesda:

The Budapest Open Access Initiative 2002 (BOAI, a declaration drawn up at a meeting sponsored by Soros’ Open Society Institute) defined open access to academic articles thus:  “By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles...”  Self-archiving and open access journals were the means suggested. Subsequent declarations from Berlin (2003) and Bethesda (2003) expanded and elaborated on the call for open access.  Subsequent “Berlin” meetings on campaigning & orchestrating for open access have been held, including the latest, Berlin 12, held in December 2015.

Ten years on from the Budapest Open Access Initiative: setting the default to open (2012):   “Ten years of experience lead us to reaffirm the definition of OA introduced in the original BOAI:

By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

Recommendations for the next ten years. (BOAI, 2012).  New guidelines issued on the tenth anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

“Every institution of higher education should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles by faculty members are deposited in the institution’s designated repository….that future theses and dissertations are deposited upon acceptance in the institution’s OA repository…require deposit in the repository for all research articles to be considered for promotion, tenure, or other forms of internal assessment and review… We recommend CC-BY or an equivalent license as the optimal license for the publication, distribution, use, and reuse of scholarly work…”

. . . .

Authors: Choose the right journal for your research.

Think, Check, Submit! There are reputable journals that are completely open or have open access options.  But there are other journals you should avoid.  Choose carefully.  Think before submitting your manuscript to an unfamiliar journal – – publishing in a predatory journal may damage your reputation.

. . . .

What about author fees? The Eigenfactor Index of Open Access Fees compares author charges with the influence of the journal. Price doesn’t always buy prestige in open access.

Link to the rest at The Lloyd Sealy Library at The City University of New York

From Science Magazine at The American Association for the Advancement of Science:

How I became easy prey to a predatory publisher

I was nursing my wounds from my latest manuscript rejection when the email arrived. I was about 2 years into my assistant professorship, with the tenure clock running at full speed, and the pressure to publish was immense. I knew that navigating rejection was part of the job, but I was also starting to wonder whether my study—a modest project designed to be feasible with the minimal lab space and skeleton crew of a new professor—would ever see the light of day. So when I received the email from a newly launched journal inviting me to publish with them, I saw a lifeline. That’s when my troubles started.

I had heard about “predatory” journals during my graduate training but had no experience with them. The email appeared legitimate. It spelled my name correctly, referenced some of my previous work, and used correct grammar. The journal wasn’t on Beall’s List of Predatory Journals and Publishers. I thought I had done my due diligence. I submitted my manuscript. Shortly after, I celebrated the first round of favorable reviews. Things were going great—or so I thought.

Maybe it was the daily emails requesting my revisions, but something started to seem off. I rechecked Beall’s list—still nothing. I found that a postdoc at my institution was listed on the journal’s website as a member of the editorial board. I sent him an email asking about his experience with the journal, hoping he would confirm its legitimacy. That’s when the roof started to cave in. My colleague explained that he had never actually worked with the journal. He eventually realized that it wasn’t a reputable publication, but he hadn’t been able to get his name removed from the website. Then a trusted mentor suggested that I check up on the parent publisher. There it was, on Beall’s infamous list. My stomach tightened. I had fallen prey to a predatory journal. I worried that publishing in such a journal could hurt my tenure case and harm my reputation as a scientist.

I asked the journal to withdraw my manuscript from review, figuring that was the logical next step. They demanded that I justify my decision and debated my right to withdraw, insisting that I pay at least $400 to do so. After an exchange of emails—akin to “no way,” “yes way,” and “no way”—and one phone call demanding payment, I informed the journal that we were at an impasse and diverted all correspondence to the trash. I submitted the manuscript to a demonstrably legitimate journal, believing that I had put the mess behind me.

. . . .

That is, until a few months later, when I noticed an email in my spam folder from the predatory journal congratulating me on my recent publication and requesting payment. I googled the title of my manuscript and found that it had indeed been published. I was horrified: My manuscript had been in review at the legitimate journal for months, and this revelation would jeopardize its publication.

Link to the rest at Science Magazine at The American Association for the Advancement of Science

PG thinks Open Access to the products of academic research is a great idea, particularly if the research is directly or indirectly funded or subsidized by taxpayer money.

However, publications that require payment from the author for inclusion in the publication are (in PG’s humbly educated opinion) akin to vanity presses and, evidently, subject to the temptations that drive sleazy vanity press operations in the non-academic world to fleece authors who wander into their clutches.

From Nature:

Spam e-mails changed the life of Jeffrey Beall. It was 2008, and Beall, an academic librarian and a researcher at the University of Colorado in Denver, started to notice an increasing flow of messages from new journals soliciting him to submit articles or join their editorial boards. “I immediately became fascinated because most of the e-mails contained numerous grammatical errors,” Beall says. He started browsing the journals’ websites, and was soon convinced that many of the journals and their publishers were not quite what they claimed. The names often sounded grand — adjectives such as ‘world’, ‘global’ and ‘international’ were common — but some sites looked amateurish or gave little information about the organization behind them.

Since then, Beall has become a relentless watchdog for what he describes as “potential, possible or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers”, listing and scrutinizing them on his blog, Scholarly Open Access. Open-access publishers often collect fees from authors to pay for peer review, editing and website maintenance. Beall asserts that the goal of predatory open-access publishers is to exploit this model by charging the fee without providing all the expected publishing services. These publishers, Beall says, typically display “an intention to deceive authors and readers, and a lack of transparency in their operations and processes”.

Beall says that he regularly receives e-mails from researchers unhappy about their experiences with some open-access journals. Some say that they thought their papers had been poorly peer reviewed or not peer reviewed at all, or that they found themselves listed as members of editorial boards they had not agreed to serve on. Others feel they were not informed clearly, when submitting papers to publishers, that publication would entail a fee — only to face an invoice after the paper had been accepted. According to Beall, whose list now includes more than 300 publishers, collectively issuing thousands of journals, the problem is getting worse. “2012 was basically the year of the predatory publisher; that was when they really exploded,” says Beall. He estimates that such outfits publish 5–10% of all open-access articles.

. . . .

Beall says that he has been the target of vicious online comments, and last December he was the subject of an online campaign to create the false impression that he was extorting fees from publishers to re-evaluate their status on his list. The Canadian Center of Science and Education, a company based in Toronto that publishes many open-access journals and is on Beall’s list, is now threatening to sue him for alleged defamation and libel. But even some experts in scholarly publishing are uncomfortable with Beall’s blacklist, arguing that it runs the risk of lumping publishers that are questionable together with those that could be bona fide start-ups simply lacking experience in the publishing industry. Matthew Cockerill, managing director of BioMed Central, an open-access publisher based in London, says that Beall’s list “identifies publishers which Beall has concerns about. These concerns may or may not be justified.”

. . . .

As a research librarian, Beall has been in prime position to watch the dramatic changes that have taken place in scientific publishing since the rise of the open-access movement about a decade ago. In the conventional subscription-based model, journals bring in revenue largely through selling print or web subscriptions and keeping most online content locked behind a paywall. But in the most popular model of open access, publishers charge an upfront ‘author fee’ to cover costs — and to turn a profit, in the case of commercial publishers — then make the papers freely available online, immediately on publication.

The open-access movement has spawned many successful, well-respected operations. PLOS ONE, for example, which charges a fee of US$1,350 for authors in middle- and high-income countries, has seen the number of articles it publishes leap from 138 in 2006 to 23,464 last year, making it the world’s largest scientific journal. The movement has also garnered growing political support. In the past year, the UK and US governments, as well as the European Commission, have thrown their weight behind some form of open-access publishing. And scarcely a week goes by without the appearance of new author-pays, open-access publishers, launching single journals or large fleets of them.

Many new open-access publishers are trustworthy. But not all. Anyone with a spare afternoon and a little computing savvy can launch an impressive-looking journal website and e-mail invitations to scientists to join editorial boards or submit papers for a fee. The challenge for researchers, and for Beall, is to work out when those websites or e-mail blasts signal a credible publisher and when they come from operations that can range from the outright criminal to the merely amateurish.

In one e-mail that Beall received and shared with Nature, a dental researcher wrote that she had submitted a paper to an open-access journal after she “was won over by the logos of affiliated databases on the home page and seemingly prestigious editorial board”. But the researcher, who prefers to remain anonymous, says that she became concerned about the peer-review process when the article was accepted within days and she was not sent any reviewers’ comments. She says that last week — several months after her original submission — she was sent page proofs that match the submitted manuscript, and that she still has not seen reviewers’ comments.

. . . .

OMICS Group, based in Hyderabad, India, is on Beall’s list. One researcher complained in an e-mail to Beall that she had submitted a paper to an OMICS journal after receiving an e-mail solicitation — but learned that she had to pay a fee to publish it only from a message sent by the journal after the paper had been accepted. “To my horror, I opened the file to find an invoice for $2,700!” she wrote. “This fee was not mentioned anywhere obvious at the time I submitted my manuscript.” (Nature was unable to contact this researcher.) Beall says that OMICS journals do not show their author fees prominently enough on their journal websites or in e-mails that they send to authors to solicit manuscript submissions.

Srinubabu Gedela, director of OMICS Group, says that article-handling fees are displayed clearly on the ‘Instructions for Authors’ web page for each OMICS journal. Gedela adds that he would assume researchers would be aware that such open-access journals charge author fees. He says that OMICS Group is “not predatory” and that its staff and editors are acting in “good faith and confidence” to promote open-access publishing.

Link to the rest at Nature

Here’s a link to OMICS International and here’s a link to the organization’s Peer Reviewed Journals page (the page has a great many journals listed).

From OMICS International’s Open Access page:

An Open Access publication is one that meets the following conditions:

» The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small number of printed copies for their personal use.

» A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable Open Access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).

» Open Access is a property of individual works.

» Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work.

Link to the rest at OMICS International’s Open Access page

From OMICS International’s Membership page:

The OMICS International membership program, initiated to accomplish the vision of making Healthcare & Scientific Information Open Access, enables academic and research institutions, societies, groups, funding organizations and corporations to actively support Open Access in scholarly publishing and also support the participation of its representatives and students in International conferences.

Membership is now available for the scientific societies/corporatecompanies/universities/institutes/individuals/students.

. . . .

Individual membership

Six Months membership

1. Member can submit 3 articles to any of the OMICS International journals
2. Member will get a prestigious certificate of six months membership from OMICS International

Annual membership

1. Member can submit 10 articles to any of the OMICS International journals
2. Member will get waiver on registration for any one OMICS International conference
3. Member will get a prestigious certificate of Annual membership from OMICS International

Three-year membership

1. Member can submit 20 articles to any of the OMICS International journals
2. Member will get waiver on registration for any two OMICS International conferences
3. Member will get a prestigious certificate of Three-year membership from OMICS International

Five-year membership

1. Member can submit unsolicited number of articles to any of the OMICS International journals
2. Member will get waiver on registration for any four OMICS International conferences
3. Member will get a prestigious certificate of Five-year membership from OMICS International

Link to the rest at OMICS International’s Membership page

From the OMICS International’s Membership Fees section of the OMICS International Membership page:

Membership	Six-months*	Annual	Three years	Five years
Individual	$ 3000	$ 5000	$ 10000	$ 15000

Link to the rest at OMICS International’s Membership Fees page

For the record, PG doesn’t know exactly what “Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work” means (perhaps it is defined further elsewhere on the OMICS website), but, absent other material factors, he would likely advise an author/client to retain ownership of the copyright to the author’s work and to not waive any rights the author may have under domestic or international copyright laws and treaties.

From Queensborough Community College, CUNY:

What is Predatory Open Access Publishing?

In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Prof. Jeffrey Beall describes the phenomenon this way:

“Predatory open-access publishers are those that unprofessionally exploit the gold open-access model for their own profit. That is to say, they operate as scholarly vanity presses and publish articles in exchange for the author fee. They are characterized by various level of deception and lack of transparency in their operations.  For example, some publishers may misrepresent their location, stating New York instead of Nigeria, or they may claim a stringent peer-review where none really exists.”

Predatory publishers may also claim to be included in directories and indexes when they are not and include faculty on their editorial boards who have not agreed to serve.

Predatory publishers began profilerating in the past few years with the increase in open access publishing, and we are now also seeing an increase in predatory conferences, some which choose a name nearly identical to an established, well-respected conference.

How Do I Avoid Predatory Publishers?

Check the publisher and journal on the predatory publishing lists linked to the left.

Contact your department’s Library Liaison for a second (or first) opinion about the authenticity of a publisher or journal. We’re happy to help faculty identify reliable, quality scholarly publishing venues.

Use the following checklist, provided by Declan Butler in Nature, as a guide for assessing publishers and journals:

How to perform due diligence before submitting to a journal or publisher.

• Check that the publisher provides full, verifiable contact information, including address, on the journal site. Be cautious of those that provide only web contact forms.
• Check that a journal’s editorial board lists recognized experts with full affiliations. Contact some of them and ask about their experience with the journal or publisher.
• Check that the journal prominently displays its policy for author fees.
• Be wary of e-mail invitations to submit to journals or to become editorial board members.
• Read some of the journal’s published articles and assess their quality. Contact past authors to ask about their experience.
• Check that a journal’s peer-review process is clearly described and try to confirm that a claimed impact factor is correct.
• Find out whether the journal is a member of an industry association that vets its members, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (www.oaspa.org). [Some questionable journals appear in directories such as DOAJ and Cabell’s; we don’t advise using this as your sole criteria.]
• Use common sense, as you would when shopping online: if something looks fishy, proceed with caution.
• Or contact your Librarian! We’re happy to help assess journals and publishers.

Link to the rest at Queensborough Community College, CUNY

The Queensborough CC page cited above also includes the following:

Predatory Publishers List

Prof. Jeffrey Beall, University of Colorada Denver librarian, maintains a list of potential predatory publishers and stand alone journals. Follow the links below to check if a publisher or journal has been flagged as possibly predatory.

• Beall’s List: Potential, Possible, or Probable Predatory Scholarly Open-access Publishers
• Beall’s List: Potential, Possible, or Probable Predatory Scholarly Open-access Journals

PG notes Professor Beall’s two lists are for Potential, Possible or Probable Predatory, etc. Publishers and Journals.

When PG checked the above referenced Publishers list, Professor Beall included Omix International.

All links were created, checked and valid on the date this post was published. PG won’t check back to determine if any of the links are no longer functioning in the future. All excerpts from the Omix International web sites are subject to the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC BY 4.0)