Comments for Scholarly Open Access

It’s not just the scammers, BE Press went “closed access” and now MANY authors are pissed off, e.g., http://www.digitopoly.org/2012/01/26/berkeley-electronic-press-closes-up-journals/

[...] expectations for LAP Lambert. The top results on a Google search included articles titled “Lambert Academic Publishing: A Must to Avoid,” “Why You Shouldn’t Publish with Lap Lambert,” and my personal favorite, [...]

Ken, you are the first person that I have read about that actually attended one of their conferences. Which conferences did you attend? They were actually conducted? What about cancellations?
Dr. E.

I cannot agree more with Dr. Beall. If open access is a boon forthose who want to do research , it could (and in fact is) used by bogus reserachers and editors to plagiarize and get credit for what they have no relation.We should all as scholars ( regardless of our level) condemn in the strongest terms these “vampires ” and expose for what they are : plain criminals .I work on open acess and peer review and these “researchers ” hate the openeness that Internet allow.

Isn’t it probable that open access publishing allows an increased detection of misconduct? If the three papers were published in obscure subscription-based journals, what are the chances that you or anyone would have compared the texts?

Author misconduct is the logical consequence of poor or nonexistent peer review. One can observe a similar negative selection effect on the viXra repository, an alternative to arXiv without endorsement procedure. What may appear like a good idea mainly results in attracting papers of poor quality.

Open access publishing adds transparency to the published literature: it does in fact increases the rate of *detection* of author misconduct. That has been noted already several years ago, e.g.

Lin, S.-K.; McPhee, D.J. Citation of Two Retracted Papers Shows Both the Impact Advantage and an Unintended Consequence of Open Access. Molecules 2007, 12, 2190-2192. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/12092190

Yes and no… For example, the 2 groups of authors:

1) Scholars that publish questionable material
2) Low level scholars that would otherwise be difficult to publish

Scholars that engage in unethical practices would have done so in OA or subscription based model. I believe the % of scholars in this group is roughly the same.

However, there is definitely far more low level scholars that are willing to pay to publish. It seems like there is more misconduct, but that’s because there are more of these types of authors able to take advantage of the OA model.

OA does allow for post-publishing examination, and that is a good thing, but only a tiny fraction is ever looked at nevertheless examined. While it is possible to detect plagiarism, the equal if not greater sin of research fraud/data manipulation is far more difficult to detect without close examination. What % of misconduct is at the research level is anyone’s guess.

Of course you’re right Dr Beal. It’s a no brainer. Most OA follows an author pays model. The old name for author pays was vanity publishing.

Agree with Geoffrey Beal. However, given the seriousness of the statements, I think that adding quantification will greatly add to the discussion. For instance, are self plagiarism more frequent in predatory journals than in non-predatory ones with comparable impact factors and equal access (or suscription price).
Variable: Frequency of plagiarism/Nr. publications in a given time.
Comparable groups: Same impact factor, same open-access policy, same charge per publication, same number of journals (if it is an editorial group, licke Omics).

This would greatly illustrate this discussion.

Actually most OA journals do not use an author pay model. There is no complete list of all OA journals but the most comprehensive list is the DOAJ. I just downloaded the complete metadata and only 28% charge author fees. You can check it yourself @ http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=csv

Reblogged this on <a href="http://phinsight.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/does-scholarly-open-access-publishing-increase-author-misconduct/" rel="nofollow">public health insight</a>.

[...] Journal International [...]

[...] that are vanity publishers. Given that some startup publishers are predatory in nature (see also Beall’s List of Predatory Open Access Journal Publishers), this can be a very useful [...]

Jeff,
thanks for your important public service. Profit driven business has the power to corrupt, and scientific publishing is no exception. Your list should be a wake up call to bring order and establish academic/scientific standards of acceptance into this “free for all” market frenzie.

[...] 18 of the potential plagiarism by University of Colorado, Denver librarian Jeffrey Beall, who first wrote about Neil’s paper in The Journal of Academic and Business Ethics in late February. What he found in that paper prompted him to look at others. Three have now been retracted, in [...]

No. The one you saw, <em>Frontiers in Aerospace Engineering</em>, is published by Science and Engineering Publishing Company, not by the publisher called Frontiers. All of Science and Engineering Publishing Company's journals are on my list, however. Their use of the term "Frontiers" may be an attempt to borrow from the prestige of the legitimate publisher.

No this publisher is not on my list. Sorry, I don’t know about their relationship with PMC.

It is shocking. Why is Lap Lambert cheating on Books?

I was pleased to read this thread. Recently one of the Bitconferences made it onto an official Government of Canada list of approved conferences and someone in Ottawa invested some time in trying to find someone to attend. I tried repeatedly to get the conference deleted but was repeatedly told that it seemed to be a good official conference. Fortunately no scientist was willing to attend.

I also find these fake meetings incredibly irritating, I get one or two per day.

Latest Images