michaelschoon Michael Schoon's Personal Website

Recently an article in Science surveyed open access journals and found a number of distressing findings with respect to the peer review process.  An overview is available at: http://www.scidev.net/global/publishing/news/sting-exposes-wild-west-of-open-access-publishing.html?utm_content=bufferb2a6d&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

The original version in Science is at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

As the Science article acknowledges, the same results could be found if we did a survey of traditional journals as well.  However, this was not done.  It would be interesting to see the results if PLOS One or another leading open access journal surveyed the traditional journal field.  Clearly, open access has opened the gates of “for profit” publishing wider, but I know of no serious academic that would either publish in such disreputable journals or seriously consider their work as quality research.  However, the Science article buries the problem with academic publishing beneath the castigating byline on the perils of open access journals.  While the pay for publication practices of some OA journals are clearly problematic, so is the traditional model of publishing, which is clearly broken.  Resting on the free labor of academics, publishing houses are currently reaping substantial profits.  These outfits are often slow (cutting research appearing years after the fact), exclusive (charges of $50+ for a typical article), and Western country-biased.  None of these four issues is mentioned in the original article, and none of these is necessary any more.  They can and are being addressed – mostly through Open Access publications.

Personally, I am closely involved with a few open access journals (and a few traditional journals as well), and they do a great job at ameliorating these problems without the shortcomings noted in the article.  The International Journal of the Commons is double-blind peer-reviewed by 3 reviewers (at minimum), has an editorial board of highly reputable and energetic scholars, and is supported by both the ISI Web of Science and Scopus, the two leading academic journal indexing bodies.  It is also free to download our articles, with most articles attracting hundreds or thousands of downloads.  It makes articles immediately available on our website without the wait for quarterly or semi-annual issues.  In addition, many of our readers, contributing authors, and reviewers are from developing countries with limited access to the traditional published journals.  IJC eliminates the problems of so many traditional publications without sacrificing high quality or reviewing standards.  My experience with Ecology and Society is the same on all counts.

Before jumping to conclusions and throwing all OA journals into the fire, let’s run the same test on traditional journals.  Then we can go back and focus on what’s important – high quality scholarship.  From there, we can look to the other problems that I’ve mentioned – speed, cost, and access.