Open access publishing 2022

Research Wants to Be Free -
Open Access Publishing -
Challenges and Successes
Terry Anderson
Professor Emeritus, Athabasca University

Stewart Brand
• “information wants to be
expensive because it is so
valuable — the right
information in the right
place just changes your life.
• information almost wants to
be free because the costs of
getting it out is getting lower
and lower all of the time. “
• So you have these two things
fighting against each
other. [3]
• (Wikipedia)

Richard Stallman
I believe that all generally useful information should be free.
By "free" I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the
information and to adapt it to one's own uses ...
When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier
no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.[9]
A prerecorded message from Richard Stallman on the generalization of non-free software during COVID-19 pandemic

The Short Story of IRRODL
• Founded 2001, always online - always diamond access
• Sponsored by Athabasca University
• 2007 -10 gained indexing in SSCI, Scopus and many others
• 2004 fight with Social Services and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) –
.
• Funding for Scholarly Journals only available for those with 100 or more PAID
subscriptions – IRRODL had 0 paid over 1,000 free subscriptions
• Call out gained 200 $10 subscribers in 2 weeks
• SSHRC still refused to fund, but following year changed the rules
• IRRODL is the highest ranked Canadian education journal; the 2nd highest
ranked open access journal; and 8th-highest ranked elearning journal in
SJR (Scientific Journal Rankings – Scimago).

Image Wikipedia
The Complex Colours of Open

With increasing number of academics,
expansion and
specialization of science,
do we need more publications??

1.Commercial Publishers &
Hybrids
2.Open Access Publishers
3.Black Alternatives
Types of
Academic Publishers

Commercial Publishers
• Dominated by Big 5 Oligarchy
Very Profitable
$$$$$$$$$

A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred
to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system,
in which “the state:
1. funds most research,
2. pays the salaries of most of
those checking the quality of
research, and then
3. buys most of the published
product”
Gaurdian (2017)
T

Over
Over 3,000 Journals
“With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it
weighs in somewhere between the recording and
the film industries in size, but it is far more
profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing
arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in
revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than
Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.”
Double profit margin of other successful magazines
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science

Funding Models
• Subscription and pay per view

How much do Academic Subscriptions Cost?
Last year, Canadian university libraries paid more than $300 million for subscriptions to research
journals, including those containing papers generated by their own professors. CBC news
46,440 full-time academic teaching staff at Canadian public universities in 2018/2019,
Stats Canada
$6,460 per full time faculty/year
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/dailyquotidien/191125/dq191125b-eng.htm

Can you Afford to Buy your Peer’s Research
Results

Article Processing Charges (APCs)
• Beall – give rise for
opportunity for
exploitive predatory
journals
• Penalize disciplines and
countries that do not
have institutional
support for publication.
“Specifically in the case of my country (Brazil)
the government spends about US$ 72 million annually
to maintain the subscription of circa 45.000 titles
(journal and book bases), which are freely available
to all public universities and research institutes
(https://www.periodicos.capes.gov.br/).
Considering this, spending with Article Processing Charges
seems to be a very bad use of public money.
Jarbas Bonetti UFSC

How much ransom should you pay to
free your article?
the biggest for-profits — Springer Nature, Elsevier, and Wiley — charge anaverage APC of
$2,660.
New Deal from Springer - a non-refundable down payment of $2,600 just
to have the paper assessed by editors and peer reviewed
open-access journals — published mostly by non-profit foundations, academicsocieties, and
universities — charged just $715 on average as of 2018. “GRIGORI GUITCHOUNTS UNDARK,
2021

• Reviewers Refusal to Review:
• Springers Response:
Thank you for inviting me to review this manuscript.
Unfortunately, I cannot review for Nature journals as
long as the new and enormous open-access APC
fee is in place. The $11,528 now being charged is
significantly above the average APC of the biggest
for-profit publishers, estimated as around $2,660
Response from Springer the high fee is “a fee that, in
theory, is designed to cover production costs so that
readers won’t have to — is warranted by its journals’
selectivity and editorial quality.”
https://undark.org/2021/01/14/big-science-publisher-is-going-open-access/). Gail Kinman

What if someone else Agrees to Pay the APC?
• Germany, Austria and UK have national APC systems
As of January, 2022, there are about 50 institutional open
access publication funds in the USA. Svetlana Korolev
(2022)

• One analysis of 37,000 articles in
hybrid ‘parent’ journals found:
• That the geographic diversity of authors
was much greater for non-OA articles
than for OA articles
• Another analysis found that authors of
OA articles were more likely to be male,
senior, federally funded and working at
prestigious universities
• Citation advantages linked to OA mean
that the academically rich, get richer.
Tony Ross-Hellauer Open science, done wrong, will
compound inequities

A new deal
from Springer!
• Costs for Guided OA could be substantially lower than the
standard APC for OA articles published in the Nature research
journals, due to a split APC payment approach1:
• An Editorial Assessment Charge of $3,690 Can is payable
for all articles passing an initial quality check and entering the
Guided OA review process.
• A top-up APC is payable at the journal your article is
accepted into ($4,213) for authors publishing in a Nature
research journal or Nature Communications or €800 for
publication in a Communications journal).

Predatory Journals
Grudniewics et al. (2019, p. 211) to be entities that are “characterized
by:
• false or misleading information,
• deviation from best editorial and publication practices,
• a lack of transparency,
• and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation
practices,”
• “An estimated 4,000 Australian academics (ca. 7% of the academic
population) are on these journal boards.” Downes, 2020

Predatory publishing
• There were 140 predatory nursing journals (2016 ) from 75
publishers. Most journals were new, having been inaugurated in the
past 1 to 2 years. …. many journals only published one or two
volumes and then either ceased publishing or published fewer issues
and articles after the first volume. (Oermann, et al.(2016), Study of Predatory Open
Access Nursing Journals. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 48: 624-632. https://doi.org/10.1111/jnu.12248
• Number of articles/predatory journal decreasing (Moed et al. (2022), Journals in
Beall's list perform as a group less well than other open access journals indexed in
Scopus but reveal large differences among publishers. Learned
Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1428
• Publishing in predatory journals much higher in developing countries

Predatory Hard to define
• “Journal Evaluation Tool” by Rele, Kennedy, and Blas (2017)
• Predatory Score” was created (Teixeira da Silva, 2013),
• Patwardhan et al. (2018) also published a scoring system that can
quantify predatory publishing.
• “finding concrete evidence that no peer review has taken place can
be difficult to prove”

Beall’s Characteristics of Predatory
Publications
• New Phenomena
• Intent to Deceive
• Poor Peer Review
• Author Charges
• Open Access
Krawczyk, F., & Kulczycki, E. (2021). How is open access accused of being predatory?
The impact of Beall's lists of predatory journals on academic publishing. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 47(2), 102271.

Open Access Caught up with Predatory
Publications
The overgeneralization of the flaws of some
open access journals to the entire open
access movement has led to unjustified
prejudices among the academic community
toward open access.
Krawczyk, F., & Kulczycki, E. (2021). How is open access accused of being predatory?
The impact of Beall's lists of predatory journals on academic publishing.
The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 47(2), 102271.

Directory of
Open Access
Journals
• DOAJ is a community-curated online directory
that indexes and provides access to high quality,
open access, peer-reviewed journals.
• 2013, John Bohannon published the article
'Who's afraid of peer review?', which pointed to
the core problem (13). He wrote a study in
which he generated fake academic articles with
a content devoid of scientific meaning and with
obvious errors and omissions.
• Sent to 300 OA Journals, accepted by 150 –
including 75 from DOAJ!
• Now Basic criteria for inclusion and The DOAJ
Seal

https://app.lib.uliege.be/compass-to-publish/

Fortunately, in Open and Distance Education most
journals listed in DOAJ have no publication fees
(diamond access) or have ‘modest’ APCs.
• “Articles published Open Select with Taylor & Francis typically receive
95% more citations* and over 7 times as many downloads**
compared to those that are not published Open Select.” Taylor and
Francis
• Standard article publishing charge (APC)
USD $2885 for Taylor and Francis Distance Education

https://www.interacademies.org/project/predatorypublishing Mar. 2022

Predatory Conferences
• “Predatory conferences or predatory meetings are meetings set up to
appear as legitimate scientific conferences, but which are
exploitative as they do not provide proper editorial control over
presentations, and advertising can include claims of involvement of
prominent academics who are, in fact, uninvolved” Wikipedia
• Conferences located at popular tourist destinations, offering second
rate keynotes, low or no reviews, limited interaction, short
presentations and high entrance fees. https://www.omicsonline.org/
• 3000 conferences, 700 Open Access Journals

Predatory conferences ‘now outnumber
official scholarly events’
UK researcher who travelled to predatory
Denmark calls for greater awareness of
October 26, 2017
Jack Grove

Purpose of DOAB
• “to increase discoverability of open
access books. Academic publishers
are invited to provide metadata of
their open access books to DOAB.
DOAB is an open infrastructure
committed to open science.

This ad-free, non-profit shadow library provides open and
free access to over 88,343,847 scientific research papers
and articles. Feb. 2022

Knowledge Want’s to be Free
• “The raven in various mythologies
represents knowledge and wisdom.
• For example, in Norse mythology the
creator God has two ravens serving him:
Huginn and Muninn which represents
‘thought’ and ‘memory’.
• In my theologies of native people who live
in the far East of Russia, the raven
represents the creator God himself.
• In Harry Potter, the faculty with the
smartest wizards is named Ravenclaw”
• Alexandra Elbakyan
Elbakyan, A., & Bozkurt, A. (2021). A Critical Conversation with Alexandra Elbakyan:
Is she the Pirate Queen, Robin Hood, a Scholarly Activist, or a Butterfly Flapping its Wing
Asian Journal of Distance Education, 16(1), 111-118.

It is much faster and easier for me to get
publication from Sci-Hub than to login to
Athabasca Library

Sci-Hub in Court
• Successfully sued in UK and USA – no payment made and Elbakyan is
very careful, where she travels!
• Servers blocked in many countries
• Publishers respond by imbedding unique identifiers in PDF so as to
track source of infringement – threat of cutting off subscription
access to an institution

Indians Fight Back
• Court case in India pending (2022)
• Sci-Hub has a good chance of winning with India’s copyright laws on
Fair Use for “research purposes”

Twitter request hashtag for “white knight”
providers sending an article on request.

Proprietary Publishers Predatory Publishers
Scholarly
Publications

Proprietary Publishers Predatpry Publishers
Scholarly Publications
Scholarly
Publications

Solutions?
• The universities and the government have and are spending the
necessary funds.
• Is the Stewardship model of sponsorship of one or more journals by a
university scalable?
• Key is the peer reviews- all else can be purchased.
• Should full time academics be required and/or rewarded for doing ‘x’
number of reviews per year?
• Do we really need centralized gatekeepers?

Terry Anderson terrya@athabascau.ca
virtualcanuck.ca
Twitter: @terguy
Your comments and questions
most welcomed!

• Lynette Owen, ‘…copyright has remained under the microscope at
both national and international level, and it is all the more important
to achieve a fair balance between the interests of creators, the
publishers who invest in bringing their works to market, and users of
those works, many of whom continue to feel that content should be
freely available’ (Owen, 2017).

Three alternatives
• An assignment of copyright.
• An exclusive license to
publish.
• A Creative Commons license.
In many cases,
researchers seem to agree to publishers’ terms
without fully investigating or understanding them
(Rapple, 2017).
What is more important:
Quality of review?
Reputation and citation index of journal?
Size of the Audience?
Amount of article processing charge (APC).
Potential for re distribution?

Open access publishing 2022

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