Questionable Open Access Publishing

Presented by Cenyu Shen DOAJ Ambassador for China

Phd Candidate, Hanken School of Economics, Finlandcenyu@doaj.org

Agenda

• Introduction to Gold OA publishing market• Background to questionable OA publishing• Main results of my ealier research on questionable

OA publishing• Reflections upon this issue

Gold OA Publishing Market

»Why?

»Innovation in digital technologies

»Librarians’ support

»Publishers’ support

Poltronieri et. al., (2016)

What is quesionable OA publishing?

•Jeffrey Beall coined the term “predatory publishers”•John Bohannon's experiment• Definition:

“The sort of OA publishers and journals who only aims to collect article processing charges (APCs), but they lack RIGOROUS peer review and PROPER marketing practices”

How to identify questionable OA publishers and/or journals?

•Two major characteristics:•Inappropriate marketing practices

•Spam emails

•Journal titles with “International”, “American” or “European”

•Fake impact factors

•Advertise a very short publishing time

•Advertise a relative low publication fees

•No or little quality control of contents•Low-standard peer review process or even don’t have peer review at all

•Other typical characteristics

Eariler Research: ‘Predatory’ Open Access: A longitudinal Study of Article Volumes and Market Characteristics (Shen and Björk, 2015)

•Earlier research about questionable OA publishing have so far mainly concentrated on exposing lacking peer review and scandals involving publishers and journals.•There is a lack of serious studies about several aspects of this phenomenon, including extent and regional effects. •The aim of our study is to provide a comprehensive understanding of questionable publishers and/or journals in terms of

•distribution of publishers and authors acorss regions

•the number of journals

•the number of articles published over the past five years

•APC costs

•publication time

Main Results

-Country of publishers

•38.7% - Asia (27.1% from India)•0.5% - South America•26.8% -Impossible to determine

Main Results

-Development of article volumes

Total article volumes:2010: 53,000

2014: 420,000In South America,

≈ 2100

Main Results

-Average number of articles per journal

Main Results

-Subject fields

Main Results

-Country of authors

•60.3% - Asia (34.7% from India)•2.3% - South America•16.4% - Africa

• To conclude, between 2010 and 2014, there was a dramatic rise in the number of questionable OA journals and articles published by them with exceptional low APCs of 300 USD per journal and a short publishing time between 2-3 months.

• The problem of questionable OA publishing is highly limited and regional to a few developing countries, where ‘international publication’ is a prerequisite for academic appointment, more funding, or promotion.

Reflections

•Questionable OA publishers and/or journals has (1) caused negative publicity to OA publishing in general (‘pay to publish’) and (2) posed a danger to the landscape of Science (‘production of low-quality research’)

•What can we do to combat the fast growth of questionable OA publishing market?

•It's critical to (1) every stakeholder need to play a role (2) call for collaborative efforts from various key stakeholders to find the effective solutions.

•Resources

•DOAJ http://doaj.org

•Think, Check, Submit http://thinkchecksubmit.org

•Beall’s list https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

Thank you!

Cenyu ShenDOAJ Ambassador for China

Phd Candidate, Hanken School of Economics, Finlandcenyu@doaj.org