Predatory Publishers Now Have Worthy Adversary, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission

Predatory publishers now have an adversary - the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). For years scientific and medical authors have been lured in to submit their articles and pay high “open access” fees without realizing the publisher was not the authoritative one they thought it was. Now the FTC has taken on a major participant. As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education (by Paul Basken, 8-30-2016), the FTC “filed a civil complaint this month in federal court in Nevada against one of the largest publishers of online science journals, OMICS Group, Inc.”

Jeffrey Beall, an academic librarian in Denver, has long tracked these publishers and records them at Beall’s List on his website, Scholarly Open Access.

For more, see my earlier post.
3-2-2018: Beall's List accessible again.  

Websites Referenced

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Federal-Prosecutors-Join-Fight/237615?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=e61b66a87ab44902ad009401675a86f4&elq=d5fef21b4193461dae71b6a7fe2f6262&elqaid=10475&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3932

https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

https://scholarlyoa.com/

http://boneuponlibrarynews.blogspot.com/search/label/predatory%20publishers

https://beallslist.weebly.com/  

Open Access "Pay It Forward" Report Released

Open Access continues to be a hot topic in the scholarly publishing world. The big question is how to pay for it. In open access, once an article has been accepted through the peer review process, the author (or the author’s institution) pays an upfront fee to be published. Then the publisher offers that article online at no charge to readers. Currently, access to articles in journals usually requires users to buy a subscription or pay to purchase single articles as needed. Some of this is transparent when people are making use of library subscriptions, but these often comprise the largest segment of a library’s budget.

The report of the University of California Pay It Forward Project has just been released. This distinguished group has been studying the future budgetary implications of the OA trend on major research institutions. If a publisher changes a journal from the paid subscription model to a fully open access funded model, institutions need to plan ahead. Library budgets, grants and author allotments are all possible funding sources, but none are straightforward. The study reported a current average article processing cost (APC), or publication fee, of $1500-2000, but this can run $2100-2400, depending on the subject and journal (p.126).

8-16-2016 update: the recently released OA2020 Initiative FAQs include useful tips.
5-31-2017 update: OASPA graphs illustrate steady growth in open access publishing 

Websites Referenced

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

http://icis.ucdavis.edu/?page_id=713

http://icis.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/UC-Pay-It-Forward-Final-Report.rev_.7.18.16.pdf
http://oa2020.org/faq/

https://oaspa.org/steady-growth-fully-oa-journals-ccby-license/ 

Gates Foundation - Changes in Access to Funded Publications

If you receive grant funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation you will want to be aware of their increasing support of open access to published research based on their funded projects. As of January 2015, the Gates Foundation requires an article resulting from their grants to be made open access immediately upon publication, rather than allowing the 12-month time delay that NIH currently requires. A grace period extends the requirement until 2017, but included in this is release of data sets and release for commercial use, too. PubMed Central serves as the foundation for making published NIH-funded research available.

Websites Referenced
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/11/gates-foundation-announces-worlds-strongest-policy-on-open-access-research.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

Open Access? Questionable Publishers

Free open access to journal articles seems like a great thing -- for readers. For the authors it often means a heavy payment to publish if your article is accepted. Apparently now there are a number of publishers that are not up front about the fee, often inviting potential authors without disclosure. For more information on this topic, take a look at the blog Scholarly Open Access by academic librarian Jeffrey Beall, who follows and investigates the world of scholarly open access publishing. His site includes lists of questionable journals and publishers.

1-29-2017 update: Beall's List has been taken down and currently its absence is unexplained.


Websites referenced:
http://scholarlyoa.com/
http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/04/09/open-access-bait-and-switch/
http://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/
http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/
https://debunkingdenialism.com/2017/01/16/what-happened-to-jeffrey-bealls-list-of-allegedly-predatory-publishers/#more-91490/

Public Access to NIH-Funded Publications - Proposed "Research Works Act" Removes Requirement

Do you know that articles based on NIH-funded research must currently be made available free to the public within 1 year of publication? PubMed Central is the repository for that, and many of you have benefitted when you do a MEDLINE search by discovering a PMC link to free full text.

A bill currently in the House would forbid NIH from requiring that these tax-supported papers be deposited. The Research Works Act is funded by -- guess who -- the Association of American Publishers. They say that releasing an article after a year denies them fair compensation, although the peer-review process is mostly done by volunteers.

The New York Times includes an opinion piece on this topic in the Jan.10, 2012, issue: Research Bought, Then Paid For by Michael B. Eisen, a founder of PLoS, the Public Library of Science. He recommends publishing in open access journals such as theirs rather than supporting commercial publishers. In this model, authors (or their institutions) whose papers are published pay a fee if accepted.

Kevin Smith, Duke University's Scholarly Communications Officer, suggested that authors should begin to consider separating print and digital copyright releases, selecting a user-friendly publisher for the electronic version (Breaking Technology, 1-5-2012, in his blog Scholarly Communications @ Duke).

Web sites referenced:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3699:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/research-bought-then-paid-for.html?_r=2&ref=opinion
http://www.plos.org/
http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/01/05/breaking-technology/