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Improving the Transparency and Credibility of Open Access Publishing
The document discusses the challenges and opportunities for improving the quality of academic publishing in India, focusing on research assessment, questionable publishers, and the promotion of open access. It emphasizes the need for cultural change in academia, stronger mandates from funding bodies, and the creation of national whitelists to support reputable journals. Proposals are made for Indian institutions to collaborate in enhancing the standards of journal publishing and to address the high number of questionable journals in the country.
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Improving the Transparency and Credibility of Open Access Publishing
- 1. Research assessment, Questionable Publishers,Whitelists and Improving the Quality of Indian Journals International Workshop on "Information Management Tools for Academic and Research Libraries", All India Shri Shivaji Memorial Society’s College of Engineering, Pune – 1 18 to 22 December 2017 Lars Bjørnshauge [email protected]
- 2. Agenda • Research Assessmentand Reward systems – an obstacle for the implementation of Open Access • Questionable publishers – and how to detect them • Improving the quality of journals published in India • Whitelists!?
- 3. Drivers for Open •Researchers, who want to share there stuff to the widest possible audience • Technologies and communication tools • Librarians, feeling that open is very near to the heart of their profession • Experimental and emerging business models facilitating open access • Emerging development of incentives (sticks and carrots): – Institutional and funder open access policies – Institutional and funder mandates
- 4. Drivers for Open •Researchers, who want to share there stuff to the widest possible audience • Technologies and communication tools • Librarians, feeling that open is close to the heart of their profession • Experimental and emerging business models facilitating open access • Emerging development of incentives (sticks and carrots): • Institutional and funder open access policies • Institutional and funder mandates • But it goes to slow!!
- 5. Obstacles for change •Reward systems • Academic Freedom • Culture in the Academy
- 6. What pays offin the current system?? • As a Researcher: • Publish in quality prestige journals – go for the High Impact Factor journals and you will be rewarded (promotion, tenure and grants) • Don´t bother to much about whether or not • your results are actually accessible for the widest possible audience • your data are archived and open • your software is documented and available • your research is actually reproducable • For your career it doesn´t really matter that much! • As an Institution: • Attract the researchers with the above behavior and the institution will get higher rankings and receive more grants
- 7. Research Assessment • Researchassessment systems have to change • Often based on the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) – JIF and other journal level metrics are subject to manipulation, gaming and fraud – researchers are NOT primarily rewarded for WHAT they publish, but WHERE they publish
- 8. The Culture ofthe Academy • The Culture of the Academy needs to change too! • The concept of Academic Freedom is often used as an excuse for publishing in the “prestige” journals. • It is the underlying logic of Green Access and Hybrid Open Access. • But Academic Freedom applies to what you are researching, what you are investigating, the methods you apply etc. • Based on your agreement with your institution and the grants you get, you will do your research.
- 9. The Culture ofthe Academy • It is often argued that your decisions as to where you publish, how you publish, the rights and permissions you give to readers/users etc belongs to my Academic Freedom. • “It is my Academic Freedom to decide where to publish”!
- 10. The Culture ofthe Academy • It is often argued that your decisions as to where you publish, how you publish, the rights and permissions you give to readers/users etc belongs to my Academic Freedom. • “It is my Academic Freedom to decide where to publish”! • I disagree!
- 11. Academic Responsibility • Appliesto how you share your research, your findings, your data, your software!! • We need stronger mandates from research funders and research institutions • Research funders and research institutions should be very specific as to how they expect researchers to disseminate their findings! • Responsible researcher conduct is to share results, data and software in the open • Librarians have an important role to play in educating the future researchers!!
- 12. It should havebeen open in the first place! If your papers, your data and your software are not in the open, it should not count!
- 13. Who can changethe system then? • Not the Publishers – they are businesses, exploiting the conditions offered to them. • The research funders, university managements, governments can change the system – Changing the reward and incentive systems – Require publishing in the open – Setting the conditions for the publishers – Changing the culture in the academy
- 14. What is neededis … • More and much stronger funder and institutional mandates • Radical changes in the research evaluation system and incentives for researchers to publish in the open! – Today researchers are rewarded based on Where they publish, i.e. in which journals they publish – Not based on What they publish, the actual content – and not based on How they publish, whether it is open and reuseable or not • A cultural change in academia is what needs to happen!
- 15. The scholarly systemI want to see • Research results are immediately accessible to everyone. • Research is verifiable and reproducable. • Research is evaluated based on its actual impact - not based on the wrapper (the journal title) • Research findings are evaluated in the open after dissemination.
- 16. This means That: •Research will be disseminated in the open with generous reuse permissions. • Research Data will be archived and made accessible. • Software associated with research will be documented and available as well. • Research Evaluation is transparent.
- 17. And this meansthat: • Researchers are rewarded – not only based on citations, but as well for • the societal impact of their research, • documenting their data and software and make it open, • contributing to peer review etc. • In short: • Researchers will be rewarded for all what they do
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- 19. Questionable publishers • Predatorypublishers – (Beall)
- 20. Definition • Definition ofpredatory: • inclined or intended to injure or exploit others for personal gain or profit (Mirriam-Webster) • A predatory publisher can then be described as • a publisher who intends to injure or exploit others for personal gain or profit. •
- 21. • Consider this: •“Does exploiting the divide between libraries (that typically pay for subscriptions) and scholars (who typically use the subscriptions) in order to make extraordinary high profits constitute predatory conduct?” • or this: • “Does continuing to raise prices at several times the rate of inflation, even as those increases cause direct injury to libraries by robbing them of budget flexibility or even make it impossible for them to continue to provide resources – does that constitute predatory publishing?”
- 22. Beall´s list • Investigationof Beall´s list (March 2014): • 9219 journals (501 publishers and 320 independent journals) • Probably thousands of the “journals” does not have an ISSN! • 1142 journals (12,6%) are either hybrid journals, not OA or unreachable/unworkable • 386 journals (4,2%) are dying or dormant • 2836 “journals” (30,8%) haven´t published a single article in 2012, 2013 and the first months of 2014! • 896 journals (9,7%) essentially empty • 1832 journals (19,9%) has published less than 30 articles (in total) in 2012, 2013 and the first months of 2014
- 23. • So far77,4% of the journals on the list are covered. • The rest (23%): • 784 journals (8,5%) should be regarded as highly questionable • 961 journals (10,4%) needs investigation • 385 journals (4,2%) are apparently good
- 24. Questionable publishers –many names: • Predatory publishers – (Beall) • Illegitimate publishers – no law regulating academic publishing • Deceptive publishers – • Unethical publishers • In DOAJ we say Questionable publishers
- 25. My definition: Questionable publishersis publishers, who are not living up to reasonable standards in terms of content, services, transparency and of business behavior.
- 26. Questionable publishing isnot a phenomenon that is specific to Open Access publishing!
- 27. October 2013 February 2014 LarsBjørnshauge
- 28. How we detectquestionable journals • Low publishing quality • Journal name, website, fees, peer review, publisher, ownership, volume of articles, advertisements, prominent soliciting for editors, ambiguous company address, many journals and few articles • Low scientific quality • focus, format, self-citations, plagiarism • Malpractice • false claims, hidden costs, spamming authors, wrong information, fake impact factor
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- 32. Promoting OA journals inNational Whitelists • Examples: • The Science Europe Recommendations: – DOAJ recognized in line with Web of Science and Scopus – The Nordic Research Councils collaborate on a whitelist and supports DOAJ – Indonesia – Many universities have DOAJ listing as a criteria for supporting APC payments for their researchers
- 33. THE NORDIC LIST Aninternational collaborative tool for publication analysis with relevance for open access
- 34. Collaboration with DOAJ •In March 2017 a collaboration was started between DOAJ and the Nordic List consortium • The consortium would like to use DOAJ as a partner in evaluating open access policies of publications channels • This is an attempt to increase the effectivness of the Nordic collaboration and also to be able to highlight good practice in publishing
- 36. Proposals for India •How to – promote good Open Access journals in the UGC list? – move forward with the contacts regarding the UGC-list – get more Indian journals recognized as good OA- journals
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- 38. Proposal for India •Step 1: Create a consortium of Indian Academic Institutions – to provide resources for DOAJ to handle applications, train journal editors/publishers to produce good applications • Step 2: establish a working group to inform about how the UGC list could be improved
- 39. Journal Applications fromIndia handled by DOAJ since March 2014
- 40. Issues • A largeproportion of questionable journals come from India • Gives India a bad reputation • DOAJ are spenging a lot of resources and time on poor quality applications • DOAJ is not blacklisting, we want to help!!
- 41. Proposals for India •Step 1: Create a consortium of Indian Academic Institutions – to provide resources for DOAJ to handle applications, train journal editors/publishers to produce good applications • Step 2: establish a working group to inform about how the UGC list could be improved • Step 3: DOAJ and your Ambassadors to conduct workshops to train journals editors in best publishing practice