Open Access Publishing

This is a subject I first wrote about years ago, but it's good to revisit. The standard model of scholarly publishing took shape in the 19th Century. I don't know all the historical details but by the time I hit graduate school this is how it worked. 

 

Journals had various kinds of ownership. Some were owned by scholarly societies, such as original, the Proceedings of the Royal Society; the New England Journal of Medicine (Massachusetts Medical Association),  Science Magazine (National Academy of Science), American Journal of Public Health (American Public Health Association) and various others. Such very prestigious and widely read journals can sell advertising, but they also charge for subscriptions. In the case of medical journals at least, the advertising is not such a great thing because most of it is purchased by drug companies. There have been cases where this has influenced editorial practice.

Journals that are less widely read and don't target a profession that constitutes a big market for products such as drugs rely entirely on subscription fees. Many of them are owned by for-profit publishers. A scholarly society may be responsible for the editorial process, but the company sells the subscriptions and pockets most of the money. The journals have a managing editor and maybe a small staff that is paid. However, most of the editorial board normally is not paid. Furthermore, the way manuscripts are evaluated is by sending them out to scholars in the field who are called "peer reviewers," and they (including me) aren't paid either. And the cost of subscribing to most scholarly journals has become prohibitive for most individuals -- subscribers are libraries, and they may pay $200 a year or more for a single journal.

All of this means that the only people who can read academic journals are people who have privileges at well-endowed university libraries, which means students and faculty, mostly in the wealthy countries. And even the most well funded university libraries are finding that they have to prune their subscription lists because journals are so costly. Most of this money isn't going to scholarly societies, it's going to the for-profit publishers.

 

So about 20 years ago some people got the idea for a different model. The World Wide Web meant that is was not longer necessary to actually print the journals. (The print journals are available on-line now as well, but they're mostly pay-walled and you still need a library account to read them.) So instead of charging for subscriptions, the idea is to charge a publication fee to the authors, to come out of the grant funding that paid for the research. .The articles are still peer reviewed and editorial decisions made by people with no financial stake. (I am an academic editor of an open access journal.) The publication fees go to fund the managing editorial staff. Everybody in the world can read the journals for free. 

This is a great idea and there are several entirely reputable open-access publishers. Public Library of Science and BMC are among them. Some academic societies have both open-access and subscription journals, and some journals give authors the option. Publishing open-access gets you more reads and more citations, all things being equal, so you might be willing to pay the fee even if you don't have to, as long as it's in your grant budget.

But, obviously, this creates an opportunity for scammers. There are essentially phony journals that will publish anything, because they only exist to pocket the fees. But here's the thing. Everybody already knows this. We are well aware that there are so-called "predatory" publishers and journals out there, and we know not to send serious work to them. Their existence is no reflection on the scholarly fields they purport to represent. They're just a scam. Demonstrating that is not clever and it doesn't reveal anything about any real problem in academia. It's just a stupid stunt.