Here is another key point raised:
“The money that academic libraries used to pay for subscriptions is now being spent on article processing charges, it seems, and universities will soon be back to where they started from with open access.”
Under the subscription system, authors (and institutions supporting authors) did not pay for the production costs (which do exist, for serious publishers), but readers and institutions supporting libraries did. Institutions have been trying to cut library budgets, but must now realise that they then have to give more support to researchers who face author fees.
Perhaps in any given research field, there would be an ideal mix of journal types available for publishing research:
1. Fully-funded (but naturally rare) institutional publications that are free to contributors and authors alike. These can aim to set standards in terms of academic quality, or support for esoteric areas of research, or for local-language publication.
2. Contributor funded publications that are free to readers.
3. Subscription funded publications that are free to contributors.
4. Various combinations of the above.
Regardless of the model, we need ways to assess cost-effectiveness, fair pricing, review methods and recognition for reviewer efforts, support for authors, support for authors, archival standards, approaches to marketing, distribution requirements, academic reliability, and so on. Jeffrey Beale has been right to attack misleading and unethical practices apparent with many new publishers.
It also seems that many new and old publishers are hoping to expand and survive through academic hegemony – an approach that researchers must resist. We have our own responsibility to support the journals and publishers we know and like… we should not simply sit back and complain about smaller publishers being swallowed by larger publishers, or about production being moved ‘offshore’ with respect to wherever we happen to stand.
We need a multiple sets of standards, or quality monitoring services, that support best practices across a range of publishing styles and methods. The aim should be to give authors and readers a wide range of good options, rather than the present multitude of confusing and unreliable options, with just a few [often unattainable] gems scattered among them.
