Publication of rigorously peer-reviewed research articles is at the foundation of scientific progress, but there is more than one approach to funding the production and dissemination of such articles. Open Access journals arose in response to a publishing system with ballooning costs and diminishing access, but soon after, predatory journals arrived on the scene to exploit the system. This talk will give an overview of the current situation in the academic journal publishing ecosystem and discuss ways that readers and researchers can protect themselves from the bad actors in that system.

1. The Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem
Christin Wixson, Scholarly Communication Librarian
Plymouth State University, January 31, 2018

2. Journal Services
• establish and maintain policies (editors)
• solicit and select articles (editors)
• organize peer review (editors)
• identify misconduct (editors & reviewers)
• copy editing? (staff)
• layout (staff)
• maintain website (staff)
• long term preservation (staff)
• journal promotion (editors & staff)
• print edition? (staff)
• advertising? (staff)

3. Journal Proliferation
• More researchers
• More sub-disciplines
• More research participation
from Global South

4. From Societies to Commercial Consolidation

5. Do for-profit journals cost more than
non-profit journals?
Yes.

6. Who Pays?
Readers
Libraries

8. “Open Access is the free, immediate, online
availability of research articles combined with the
rights to use these articles fully in the digital
environment. Open Access is the needed modern
update for the communication of research that
fully utilizes the Internet for what it was originally
built to do—accelerate research.”
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

9. Open Access Journals
Manuscript
subjected to
peer review
Author grants
license to
publish, may
pay article
processing
charge (APC)
Article is
immediately
accessible to
public

10. Journal Publishing Costs
Costs to Publishers
No one knows.
It depends.
“low hundreds per article”
or
$3500-$4000 per article
Costs to Authors
• 73% of OA journals have no APCs
(43% of articles)
• $660 average APC
• Examples
• PLoS ONE $1495
• BMC Biology $2785
• Scientific Reports (Nature) $1760
• PeerJ $1095 or $399 membership
• Challenges to Sustainability $170

11. Public Service Announcement

12. Business Model ≠ Peer Review
• establish and maintain policies
• solicit and select articles
• organize peer review
• identify misconduct
• copy editing
• layout
• maintain website
• long term preservation
• journal promotion
• print edition?
• advertising?

13. “Predatory” Journals • establish and maintain policies
• solicit and select articles
• organize peer review
• identify misconduct
• copy editing
• layout
• maintain website
• long term preservation
• journal promotion
• print edition?
• advertising?

14. Pseudo-Journals
Illegitimate
Publishing Entities

15. #peerreviewfail
• Bohannon’s Sting (OA and IPE)
• Diederik Stapel (traditional)
• Medical researcher discovers
integration, gets 75 citations
(traditional)
• Publishers withdraw more than
120 gibberish papers
(traditional)
• See also: retractionwatch.com
Not even trying
• Bohannon’s Sting (OA and IPE)
• Get me off your &#%!@?
Mailing list (IPE)
• paper written by iOS
autocomplete accepted for
conference (predatory
CONference)

17. Under Development

18. Field Guide to Journal Publishing

19. Solicitations
• Appropriate and well-targeted
• Does not specify a particular work
• Poor grammar & spelling
• Asks for submission fees rather than publication fees
• Advertises rapid turn around times
• Repeated spamming
• Guarantee manuscript acceptance

20. Contact Information
• Includes telephone, email, and mailing address
• Name of journal is unique, not intended to mislead
• Name of journal is similar to well-known journal
• Unprofessional email domains (gmail or yahoo)
• Do not receive responses to email or phone within a couple days
• Mismatch between editor locations and address
• Mismatch between journal name and address

21. Publishing Organization
• Name clearly displayed on website
• Ownership and management clearly indicated
• Affiliation with academic or scholarly institution
• Publisher is a member of industry initiatives (COPE, OASPA, DOAJ)
• Not easy to find website
• Name of organization is similar to a well known organization –
misleading

22. Editorial Board
• Full names and affiliations of editors provided
• You or your colleagues recognize their names & reputations
• Editors refer to the journal on their websites
• Editors disavow knowledge of journal when contacted
• “Coming Soon”
• Fake credentials

23. Editorial Policies & Information
• Fee structure is easy to find (how
much, when charged)
• Peer review process clearly
explained
• Conflict of interest policy
• Retraction & correction policy
• Publication schedule and frequency
• Preservation & backup plan
(CLOCKSS, LOCKSS, PubMed
Central)
• Instructions for authors
• Authorship criteria
• Description of manuscript handling
process
• Article submission via email
• Fees higher or lower than expected
• Multiple sections above are missing
• Copyright transfer required even
though purports to be Open Access

24. Aims & Scope
• Are prominently displayed
• Well defined & clearly stated
• Articles on the website fall within that scope
• Scope is surprisingly large
• Includes topics that are unrelated to each other

25. Articles
• Author contact & affiliation information appears in article
• Past authors had positive experiences
• Usage rights clearly stated
• Many articles by the same author(s)
• Number of articles unusually small, large or variable
• Corner cutting on copy-editing & layout (typos, unprofessional
appearance)
• Errors in text – more than the odd typo
• Articles are not present

26. Affiliation with Services & Organizations
• Indexed in databases you use (Web of Science)
• Listed in Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• Member of Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
• Member of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
• DOIs, ISSNs
• Has a Journal Impact Factor
• False index claims
• Fake impact factors
• Index Copernicus Value (ICV)
• CiteFactor
• Universal Impact Factor

27. Journal Impact Metrics
• Journal Impact Factor/Journal Citation Reports
• SCImago Journal Rank
• Eigenfactor Score

35. thinkchecksubmit.org

36. References
Slide 1: The Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem
Image by Free-Photos on Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/photo-690976/ used under CC0
Slide 2: Journal Services
Image by John Flannery on Flickr, https://flic.kr/p/5ERMAE used under CC BY-SA 2.0
Slide 3: Journal Proliferation
Image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/Wu1XZGZ41ng
Graph from https://www.library.pitt.edu/subscriptions, data from http://ulrichsweb.serialssolutions.com
Slide 4: From Societies to Commercial Concentration
Lariviere, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P. (2015). The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502
Slide 5: Do for-profit journals cost more than non-profit journals?
Image by Amaury Laporte on Flickr, https://flic.kr/p/MtqaSa used under CC BY-NC 2.0
Van Noorden, R. (2013). Open access: The true cost of science publishing. Nature. https://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676
Slide 6: Who Pays?
Image by Mat on Flickr, https://flic.kr/p/58roiC used under CC BY-ND 2.0
Slide 7
Howard, J. (2012). Saying costly subscriptions ‘cannot be sustained,’ Harvard library committee urges open access. Chronicle of Higher Education.
https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/saying-costly-subscriptions-cannot-be-sustained-harvard-library-committee-urges-open-access/42589

37. Slide 8: Open Access
Image by Philipp Berndt on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/5i0GnoTTjSE
SPARC (n.d.) Open Access. https://sparcopen.org/open-access/
Slide 9: Open Access Journals
Image 1 by Florian Klauer on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/mk7D-4UCfmg
Image 2 by NeONBRAND on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/8fDhgAN5zG0
Image 3 by Jason Leung on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/ShoP4ESuIsY
Slide 10: Journal Publishing Costs
Crotty, D. (2015). Is it true that most open access journals do not charge APC? Sort of. It depends. Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/08/26/do-most-oa-
journals-not-charge-an-apc-sort-of-it-depends/)
Van Noorden, R. (2013). Open access: The true cost of science publishing. Nature. https://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676
Slide 11: Public Service Announcement
Image by Jens Lelie on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/u0vgcIOQG08
Slide 12: Business Model ≠ Peer Review
Jaschik, S. (2015). Language of protest. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/02/editors-and-editorial-board-quit-top-linguistics-journal-protest-
subscription-fees
Slide 13: #peerreviewfail
Bohannon, J. (2013). Who’s afraid of peer review? Science. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
Liberman, M. (2013). The open access hoax and other failures of peer review. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7584
Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007). https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
Van Noorden, R. (2014). Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. Nature. https://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763
Safi, M. (2014). Journal accepts bogus paper requesting removal from mailing list. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/nov/25/journal-accepts-paper-
requesting-removal-from-mailing-list
Slide 14: “Predatory” Journals
Image by Patrick Brinksma on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/P0-AJ-R6OUM
Slide 15
Image by Dieter Michael Rauch on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/iYrFqXSwxNU

38. Slide 16
Image by David Midgley on Flickr, https://flic.kr/p/4jqWey used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Slide 17
Image by Aaron Burden on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/URXoswgLc44
Slide 18: Field Guide to Journal Publishing
Image by Daniel von Appen on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/IAMNlBMq8B8
Slide 26: Affiliation with Other Services & Organizations
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) https://doaj.org
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) https://oaspa.org
Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) https://publicationethics.org
Jalalian, M. (2015). The story of fake impact factor companies and how we detected them. Electron Physician. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4477767/
Slide 27: Journal Impact Metrics
Image by NASA on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/Q1p7bh3SHj8
Wixson, C. (2017). Scholarly Communication: Impact Metrics. http://library.plymouth.edu/scholcomm/impactmetrics
Callaway, E. (2016). Beat it, impact factor! Publishing elite turn against controversial metric. Nature. https://www.nature.com/news/beat-it-impact-factor-publishing-elite-turns-
against-controversial-metric-1.20224
Slide 31
http://davidpublisher.com/index.php/Home/Sub/index.html
Slide 32
https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/submission-guidelines
Slide 33
COPE/DOAJ/OASPA/WAME (2018). Principles of transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing version 3. https://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines-new/principles-
transparency-and-best-practice-scholarly-publishing
Slide 34
Beall’s List: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers. http://web.archive.org/web/20161222020349/https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/
Crawford, W. (2016). “Trust me”: The other problem with 87% of Beall’s Lists. https://walt.lishost.org/2016/01/trust-me-the-other-problem-with-87-of-bealls-lists/
Slide 35
Think. Check. Submit. http://thinkchecksubmit.org
Slide 39: Questions
Image by Evan Dennis on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/i--IN3cvEjg

39. Questions?