Unearthing Open Access Resource Evaluation:Joining Together to Avoid Inadequate Peer Review

Process and Predatory Publishing

Nina CollinsMcMillen Library, Indiana Tech

Discovery to Delivery 5: Better TogetherApril 25, 2014

Project Beginnings

Liaison to PhD program, Global Leadership

Our students need instruction on evaluating journals

Acceptance rate

Impact factor and other bibliometrics

Editorial board and Institutional affiliation

Quality of papers submitted

Scope of Journal

Spam email solicitations for manuscripts

“Call for paper”

Root issue: Need to evaluate new Open Access publications

Traditional Scholarly Publishing

Traditional Model

Scholar produces a scientific manuscript, then sends it to the editor of a scholarly journal

Editor reviews the manuscript, then sends it to peer reviewers

Peer reviewers review the manuscript and return the manuscript to the editor with comments, suggestions, and recommendations

The editor makes a final decision concerning acceptance, acceptance with modification, or rejection

Author gives all copyright permissions to the publisher, who assumes all costs in publication

Traditional Scholarly Publishing

Editors of journals play a gatekeeping role

Journals require subscriptions for access

Having signed away copyright, creators of the scholarly works must pay for access

Who pays for access:

Libraries

Institution pays salary of researchers

Grant funded research?

Open Access Scholarly Publishing

“By Open Access, we mean the free, immediate, availability on the public Internet of those works which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment – permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose.”

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC),(2013)

Green Open Access

Creators are allowed to place a preprint copy of the manuscript on an institutional repository

Resources on the institutional repository are freely available to all

Costs of maintaining the repository are funded by the institution

Only works when the institution has a repository, and encourages faculty to archive their scholarly content on the repository

Most traditional publishers support Green OA

As the Interlibrary Loan librarian, I LOVE Green OA. I often check to see if a resource is available in a repository before requesting ILL

Gold OA

Often called the “Author pays” model, used by online journals

The costs of publication are usually funded by the authors, in the form of “author fees”, or “article processing fees”

Author fees vary significantly based on the discipline and the publisher

Many OA publishers have policies for waiving the author fees for scholars in developing nations, or who cannot afford the fee

The fee is sometimes paid by the research sponsor (Institution or funding agency)

Benefits of OA

No barrier to access

Taxpayers can access the research they helped fund

Permission to reuse, if giving credit to original creator

Increases visibility and usage of scholarly works

Increases access to scientific work for developing nations

Increases citations of scholarly works (Gargouri, 2010)

Suber (2012)

Criticisms of OA

How much value is added by publishers (editors, copy-editors, and illustrators)?

What are the real costs involved in Open Access publishing?

Green, Gold, Delayed, Hybrid

Business Models

Quality

Discoverability of materials in Institutional Repositories Salo (2007)

Predatory Publishers

Crawford (2011)

Predatory Publishers

Use the author-pays model, Gold Open Access

Are not limited to Open Access publications. Can include conferences, or traditional publishing business models

Remind us that as scholars, evaluation of resources cannot be underestimated; we must be diligent

Engage in Inadequate peer-review processes.

Look like legitimate publishers

Beall (2013)

Predatory PublishingUnethical Practices

Deception

Negligence or non-adherence to standards

Lack of transparency

Beall (2013)

Unethical Practices: Deception

The websites look like legitimate publishers (ex.)

The journal/publisher name mimics an established journal/publisher (ex.)

Journal name does not reflect geographic location (ex.)

Not indexed by reputable indexing and abstracting services, but claim to be

Coverage is misrepresented in abstracting & indexing services

List databases as abstracting/indexing services that are not true abstracting/indexing services (ex.)

Make up citation metrics

List people on the editorial board who have not agreed to serve OR refuse to provide names of editorial board

Lie about location of publisher headquarters (ex. Avens Publishing Group)

Beall (2013)

Unethical Practices: Negligence or Non-adherence to Standards

Inadequate peer-review

A publisher may list the same editor for all its journals

A journal has very broad coverage or subject matter

Author side fee

Spelling or Grammar errors (ex.)

Fail to provide contact information for the journal or editors

Use email to solicit manuscripts (spam)

Fleet Startup (ex.)

May not use ISSN or DOIs

Licensing problems (ex.)

Use Yahoo! Or Gmail addresses

Poor website search functionality (ex.)

Dead Links (ex.)

Beall (2013)

Unethical Practices: Lack of transparency

Claim Peer review, when they do not practice adequate peer review

Little or no information about the peer review process

Fail to clearly state author side fees

Fail to list editorial board or contact information for editorial board

The only contact information for the editor is an online form, or an email through the website

Beall (2013)

Predatory Publishing Quick Check

Has the publisher started dozens of new Open Access titles all at once?

Do the published titles have very few papers (if any)?

Does the publisher send e-mails to myriad researchers asking for manuscript submissions or to serve on editorial boards?

Does the publisher fail to disclose the names of editorial board members or editors?

Is the publisher’s address NOT verifiable?

Is there very little evidence of peer review?

Crawford (2011)

Peer Review Sting

Predatory Publishers often exercise poor peer-review practices.

Turn around time is very fast (a week or two).

In a recent sting operation, a fake scientific paper, written by a fake scientist, working at a fake university, was submitted to 304 Open Access journals.

It was accepted by 54% of the Open Access publications.

Many of the publishers that accepted the paper were listed on Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers.

Bohannon, J. (2013)

Peer Review Fail

In 2005, graduate students in the PDOS research group at MIT CSAIL built an automatic scientific paper generator, called SCIgen, Stribling et al (2005).

Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble built an automatic SCIgen detector, to unmask SCIgen generated papers, Labbe (2013).

Recently, more than 120 SCIgen created scientific papers are being withdrawn from publishers, including Springer and IEEE, Norden (2014).

Journal Evaluation in Perspective

Peer-review is an integral part of scientific practice. As scholars, we must be diligent in our critiques of scientific research.

Continued evaluation on the part of scholars marks the distinction between science and pseudo-science.

Individuals have lost their jobs for publishing in predatory journals, or for serving on editorial boards of predatory journals. Beall, J. (2014).

One’s professional reputation can make or break their career.

Implications for Librarians

Collection Development

Discovery Layer (I used the PPET Project to assess new Open Access journals before adding them in the knowledge base in WMS)

Interlibrary Loan

Liaison Roles

PPET ProjectPredatory Publishing Evaluation Tool

Created a checklist tool for emerging scholars to help them evaluate online journals

PPET Project

Partial online checklist tool

Our Ph.D. Students are distance students

We could tack on an optional user survey

ReferencesBeall, J. (2014, February 20). Iceland professor in hot water for publishing in predatory journals. Scholarly Open Access: Critical analysis of scholarly open access publications. Retrieved from http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/02/20/iceland-professor-in-hot-water-for-publishing-in-predatory-journals/

Beall, J. (2014, January 24). University of Pristina Rector under fire for publishing in predatory journals. Scholarly Open Access: Critical analysis of scholarly open access publications. Retrieved from http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/01/24/university-of-pristina-rector-under-fire-for-publishing-in-predatory-journals/

Beall, J. (2013). Unethical Practices in Scholarly, Open-Access Publishing. Journal of Information Ethics, 22(1), 11-20. doi: 10.3172/JIE.22.1.11

Bohannon, J. (2013, October 4). Who’s afraid of peer review? Science, 342(6). Retrieved from https://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

Crawford, W. (2011). ALA Editions Special Reports : Open Access : What You Need to Know Now. Chicago, IL, USA: American Library Association Editions 

Gargouri, Y., et al. (2010). Self-selected or mandated, Open Access increases citation impact for higher quality research. PLoS One, 5(10).

Labbé, C. (2013). SCIgen Detection. Retrieved April 23, 2014, from http://scigendetection.imag.fr/main.php

Noorden, R. V. (2014, February 24). Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. Nature News. Retrieved April 23, 2014, from http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763

Salo, D. (2008). “Innkeeper at the roach motel.” Library Trends: 57(2).

SPARC, (2013). Why Open Access? Retrieved from http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/open-access/why-oa

Straub, D., & Anderson, C. (2010). Journal Quality and citations: common metrics and considerations about their use. MIS Quarterly, 34(1), iii-xii.

Stribling, J., Krohn, J., & Aguayo, D. (2005). SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator. Retrieved April 23, 2014, from http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

Suber, P. (2012). MIT Press Essential Knowledge : Open Access. Cambridge, MA, USA MIT Press

For More Information:

Beall’s 2014 List of Predatory Publishers

PPET Project

Contact me

Nina Collins

260.422.5561 x 2155

nkcollins@indianatech.edu

Twitter: @CollinsnNina

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/collinsnina

www.collinsn.comPostscript: Thanks to all who provided great feedback today! Due to good feedback, the PPET Project will Continue to evolve, beginning with the changing of the name to simply, the PET Project. Thanks again!