I hope that many of you might have read the article entitled “Who's Afraid of Peer Review?” by John Bohannon published in Science, Vol. 342 no. 6154, October 2013 pp. 60-65 (DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6154.60)
It clearly states the status of many open-access journals and their methodology of peer reviewing. I am not concerned about those who are making this as a business.
What is the driving force for many researchers to opt for these sorts of open access journals? Lack of awareness about these journals or crave for visibility/citation?
Dear Sankara, I believe that many researchers opt for OA journals searching for a higher visibility/citation in addition to the fact that OA journals often have a faster peer review process. So, in my opinion, the real "driving force" in such cases can be attributed to the enormous pressure over scientists impelling them to publish more and more articles per year, that is, the famous policy of "Publish or perish"...
Actually there are the very obvious driving force that the publishers of traditional journals are making huge profits from selling our work to university libraries. This drains funds from research. If the payment is moved to the publishing stage it creates a marked situation.
The Nature article properly forgot to mention that improper review also occur in small journals with traditional subscription based business models.
Some researchers publish in bad OA journals because they either need to be published fast, because they do not know that the quality of OA journals varies a lot or because (sad, but true in some cases) they cannot write papers that would be good enough to be published in good journals....
Two things drew my attention in Bohannon's article. One is the comment that if this experiment was carried out through traditional pay to access peer-review journals some would have go through and two I think the Bohannon article was of course serious but in part a piece of hack journalism. The mad and the bad journals are easy to spot and he managed to get them to do the predictable thing and take the money. So what.
The point here is that Open Access journals do not apply the same criteria as traditional pay for view journals with a printed heritage. The bit they miss is that a paper must make a significant contribution to the literature. Otherwise any competent paper, that is well researched and well written can be published if you pay and are prepared to go through the peer review process. Clearly with more academics and researchers looking of publish more papers the the Open Access route provides a space for the competent, but not brilliant, and fills a need for the ambitions of researchers and academics. I can't really see an issue with this.
There are possibly two problem areas, which have been discussed on other threads on RG.
One that the pressure to publish in some academic cultures drive at best mediocrity and at worst a collusion with some predatory open access publishers (we have to use the term with care) to just publish material that is plagiarised, fraudulent or of very poor quality. The authors don't mind and the publishers don't care. They get paid. I don't see this as a problem for global academia but looking at Bohannon's map it's not hard to see that some countries have a problem that will in my view start to degrade their entire national academic effort if it is not addressed.
The second is the ignorance and naivety of some researchers and academics. Predatory Open Access publishers are criminals pretending to be publishers to scam money from the unwary. That's all they do. However, if you get caught by them its your fault for not doing proper research. If the website is too interested in asking for money, if there is no content, if its poorly designed, if they say they are open access but charge to see papers, if the papers are poor, if the title is improbable and so on. You can spot them easily if you look, or an informed colleague may be able to advise.
Most researchers would, I think, be pleased to publish with a credible Open Access publisher, or a pay for view publisher offering an Open Access route, to see their work available. ResearchGate may have a role in educating potential authors in the pitfalls, advantages and disadvantages of Open Access.
Matt Holland - "Research Gate may have a role in educating potential authors in the pitfalls, advantages and disadvantages of Open Access" - I agree with you that is the bottom line
Concerning the problem of "predatory open acess publishers", Beall's list could be helpful - at least for a more systematic and not totally time-consuming check-up of the seriousness of a publisher ...
http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/
Hi Sankara Narayanan: I have discussed with some of our scientists in this regard and they are opting OA journals for two major reasons viz., high visibility (so that they can get good citations which will help them to build good h-index) and shorter duration of time taken for publishing by OA journals. But, I strongly believe there are good number of OA journals which are maintaining good peer review system and standard of scholarly publishing.
Fast track publishing and full paper availability , though its indexing and peer-reviewing process need to atleast meet minimum criteria so that good papers are only published
Fast tracking ability and full text availability are the two basic driving forces for many researchers to opt for open access journals. Of course, indexing is important.
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