Open access supporters, such as many users in RG, see the high cost of many academic journals, whose subscriptions often run into thousands of dollars per year, as unsustainable for cash-strapped libraries, and unaffordable for researchers in emerging economies [1]. But, do they contribute significantly in "added value" as papers progress through the publication process? The answer and evidence points to no. Do you have an example, or reason to share, pro or con?
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180308/03225939387/research-shows-that-published-versions-papers-costly-academic-titles-add-almost-nothing-to-freely-available-preprints-they-are.shtml
Thanks for sharing the research evidence. I had a firm belief that no value addition was the case but could not back my claim with empirical evidence.
Hi! Thanks for the link! However, what is not discussed is that journals with the free help of reviewers keep away some research which is far from publishable so we don't have to read it in the journal. Sometimes it shows up somewhere else. However, a lot of papers that other researchers in a field do not want to read slips through the quality sorting and novel very interesting papers can sometimes be stopped of some smaller formal reason.
But anyway, the situation seems bound for change. The present state of art does not feel sustainable.
(this a comment by L. Jean Camp)
Please do not confuse fake journals with real journals based on the business model of the actual journals. It is the reviewing process that is valuable not the publication process.
Calling out reliable publishers as fake through a deeply flawed analysis is not helpful to the current state of affairs. This is not a trivial problem. Bad studies do not help. And neither does one-liners attacking academics and the tenure process. You publish this today as the House is calling for grant review by non-technical people for the National Science Foundation. Please do not be part of the anti-science problem. By filtering *after* the reviewing process of course the primary value of publishing is removed. These are only pre-prints because they have been filtered by editing. It was the filtering that identified these are acceptable that is the value added, and that filtering was done before the sampling. It is like filtering college students and finding that those selected in competitive engineering programs already know calculus, so what are we teaching, let's cancel those useless courses!? The paper you pointed to has clear contributions to a political agenda and the surrounding discourse but less clear contributions to the discourse of the value of peer review. It examine papers "which were taken from the arXiv.org preprint repository, and compared with the final versions that appeared," meaning that the editorial process was disappeared. I would also point out that people regularly update preprints to include the changes made in the final version. I would argue this badly designed polemic has received more, not less, attention that it deserves. It is published in a library journal likely for the resulting discourse because we *know* this is an important and difficult problem, not because this is a well-designed study. OMG, it is worse than it appears. They only look at papers with the DOI. You only add the DOI after the editorial process is complete because part of the DOI identified the publisher. OF COURSE THERE WERE NOT CHANGES! "we downloaded PDFs of every pre-print article from arXiv.org with a DOI that could be matched to a full-text published version" means they downloaded identical versions of articles, labeled as identical, and compared these to the same version looking for differences. Mostly these were not the same. Hooray! DOI works!! "So academics are all corrupt fraud whores" does not logically follow. I do not get paid to edit or review. Payment is associated with journal publication only occasionally and then only in the final round, where some journals allow payment for open access. There truly are fake journals with pay to publish, actual predatory journals: https://beallslist.weebly.com/ archived and updated at https://predatoryjournals.com/journals/ Most of these are >>>>>open access
So far, all the journals I paid did a great job on my manuscript and it really improved the outcome of the study. However, I know there could be some out there who are set out for solely business and may not be effective.
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