Session 09

RPE04
Open Access Publishing

K.M. Sharath Kumar

Research Division

1
 Outline

• Open Access

• Green Road and Gold Road

• Assessing Quality of Open Access Journals

• Case Study at Switzerland

• Tools to Identify Predatory Journals and Publishers

2
 Session Objectives

At the end of session, Scholars shall be able to:

• Identify and assess merits and de-merits of Open Access Publishing

• Search as well as categorize the quality of Open Access Journals

along with identification of predatory journals

• Follow efforts in Academia towards Open Access Publications

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 What is Open Access?

Source: Barbara Hirschmann, ETHZurich

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Conventional Publication Cycle

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A Comparison

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Reality and Reality Show

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Why Open Access (OA)?

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How does it Work?

Green Road
Gold Road

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How it Works? (1/2)

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How it Works? (2/2)

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 OA Regulations

• SHERPA/RoMEO Database (http://www.Sherpa.ac.uk/romeo)

• Publisher/Journal Website

• Copyright Transfer Agreement

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SHERPA/RoMEO in OA Publishing

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 Gold Road

• Quality Control (Peer Review)

• Different Funding Mechanisms

– Article Processing Charges
– Institutional, Society, Library Funding

• Author Retains Copyright

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Assessing Quality of OA Journals

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Authenticity

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 Assessing Quality of OA

• Review on QOAM (Quality Open Access Market)

• Is the Member of OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers

Association) or COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)?

• Look in Journal’s Website:

- Whether Peer Review is adopted?
- Distinguished Scholars and Scientists are Authors and/or
Members of Editorial Board

More Tips: http://thinkchecksubmit.org

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OA Journals: Institutional Funding

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 Challenges in OA

• Open Access publishing is developing steadily, but slowly

• Financial aspects of Gold Open Access are not solved
• Can financial savings be achieved? Who will finance additional costs
during the “transition period”?
• Green Open Access probably not to become a standard if it does
not come with strong enforcement mechanisms
• Current academic reward system is a major barrier for change in the
scholarly publication system

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 Case Study

ETH Zürich is a Public Research University in the

city of Zürich, Switzerland

Founded by the Swiss Federal Government in 1854

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 Open Access in Switzerland: National Strategy

• Adopted by Swiss Universities General Assembly in January 2017

Goal: all publicly funded publications must be freely accessible by 2024

Action Items: Adopting and aligning OA policies
Negotiations with publishers
Coordinating and pooling resources
Alternative forms of publishing
Communicating and raising awareness
Supportive regulatory framework
National monitoring

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OA at ETH Zurich I

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 OA at ETH Zurich II

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Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences
Research Collections

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Publication Directory/University Bibliography

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Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences
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Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences
Automatic and Manual Ingest

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Citable DOIs and DOI Preview Option

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Step by Step Instructions to Upload
Publications and Research Data

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ETH Library’s E-Publishing and
Digital Curation Services

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 Software Tools to Identify
Predatory Journals and Publishers

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Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences
 Identifying Predatory Publishers

• Use the Gold Open Access Model (Author pays)

• Article Processing Charges (APCs)

• Conflict of Interest: more papers accepted = more income

• Not all OA journals are bad; not all traditional ones are good

• Monetary transactions from authors to publishers cause many

problems

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 How Predatory Publishers Operate?

• Experts at manipulative
spamming

• Target young and emerging

researchers

• Mimic Legitimate Publishers

in many ways

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How Predatory Publishers Operate?

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How Predatory Publishers Operate?

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How Predatory Publishers Operate?

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What I Received !!!

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 How Predatory Publishers Operate?

• They lie; they are Counterfeit Publishers

• They are often ONE MAN OPERATIONS

• Author Oriented vs. Reader Oriented

• Customers include unlucky honest folks and complicit folks

• Chiefly in Asia and Africa, but also many in the UK, Ontario, Australia, and the US

• They also operate bogus Conferences

• Journals with Broad Coverage

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 Current List of
Predatory Publishers and Journals

http://scholarlyoa.com
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 Membership Organizations

• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)

• Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE) – Code of Conduct by

Journal Publishers [PDF]

• International Association of Science, Technical and Medical

Publishers (STM) – Code of Conduct

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Why Predatory Publishers are Problematic?

• They corrupt open access and give it a bad name

• Possibly have increased the occurrence of research misconduct

• Threaten demarcation and the cumulative nature of research

• Bogus research has affected societal institutions

• Fostered the creation of predatory conferences

• General public has access to bad science

• They don’t back up their content

43
 Fake Metrics
• Fake metrics (or misleading metrics) are numbers that are just
“made up” and assigned to journals, etc.
• Companies sell these metrics and call them “impact factors”
• Publishers use ‘fake metrics’ on their websites and in their spam
email to make their journals look like real ones and attract more
papers

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 Spammers

• Research promotion companies

• Thesis and dissertation vanity presses

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Hijacked Journals

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 How can we stop Predatory Publishers?

• Predatory publishers enjoy freedom of the press

• Operate internationally

• Open access advocates too often turn a blind eye to predatory

publishers

• Hubris and bullying in the open access movement

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Academic Services Companies

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 Implications for Journal Editors

• Scholarly publishing is becoming geared towards Authors’ needs

and less towards readers’ needs

• Authors will expect / demand a faster peer review process

• Authors using copy editing services will submit more polished

papers

• Peer review may be changing ....

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 Changes in Peer Review

• Cascading peer review

• From one journal/publisher to another

• Outsourcing / monetization peer review (by individual authors, by

journals)

• Post-publication peer review

• Will peer-review become decoupled from the journal submission

process?

50
 Software Tools to Identify Predatory
Publishers and Journals

Software Tool to identify Predatory Publications developed by SPPU

https://www.csitweb.com/predatory-publishing/

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 Journal Finder and Suggestion Tools

Journal Finder
https://beckerguides.wustl.edu/c.php?g=648201&p=4545487

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 Session Summary

• No end in sight to the problem of predatory publishers

• Despite the OA movement, there is an increased

commercialization of various scholarly communication
components

• Scholarly publishing is becoming more author-focused and less-

reader focused

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Thank You

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