Scholarly Open Access

There's good arguements for and against a complete conversion to open access research. Ruining all the free fun of open access are charlatans from around the world creating open access journals from nothing and picking up free money and prestige. I'd like to abring up this website: http://scholarlyoa.com/ It's run by a librarian in Colorado, and he has a set of criteria to determine whether a given open access journal qualifies as a "predatory" journal. Sometimes you see stuff like this gem: http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/11/20/bogus-journal-accepts-profanity-lace… I can't find the link, but I once read a story where they published a paper titled, "Enter paper title". That's how reputable some of these outfits are. Open access won't be perfect.

[reposting from a previous submission that didn't get any traction] If anyone wants a good idea for a startup in the academic journals space, I'd recommend looking into vetting peer reviewers as part of the article submission/review process. There have been a few high profile cases of people faking their peer reviews recently. At Sage we dealt with a big case of that earlier in the year and retracted 60 papers. A new case this week seems like it involves 5 published papers and a bunch that got caught before being published. Note that both those cases (and some more) use ScholarOne as the submission management platform. In particular, the new hotness in the academic journal world is open access journals, and OA journals need to be particularly careful about bad stuff slipping through peer review. A few OA journals from Hindawi just lost their impact factor (source: http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/10/14/the-scientific-world-journ...), not due to outright peer review fraud, but due to other "abnormal citation patterns". For OA journals getting or losing an impact factor has a HUGE impact on the # of submissions (which are directly tied to revenue), so there's a big need to ensure you don't get caught with your pants down when it comes to the peer review process. So if you had a product that gave a publisher higher confidence in the integrity of the peer review process I imagine you'd be able to get a number of bites from big and small publishers alike.

The story behind this is here: https://scholarlyoa.com/bogus-journal-accepts-profanity-laced-anti-spa… “After receiving a spam email from the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, Dr. Peter Vamplew of Federation University Australia’s School of Engineering and Information Technology sent the anti-spam article as a reply to the spam email without any other message, expecting that they might open it and read it, but not that it would be considered for publication. To his surprise, the journal accepted the paper and sent him an acceptance email that had two PDF attachments. One was a formal statement of acceptance and the second was the reviewer report.”

https://scholarlyoa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/reviewer-form-1024x… I'm not sure whether that's the full report though.

Be aware that this journal is published by Pharma Intelligence[0], which is with high certainty a predatory publisher. I would take this article with a large grain of salt, as it's authors have not been able to get the research published by a proper journal. [0] http://scholarlyoa.com/2015/08/27/open-access-journal-provides-one-day…

This journal is not indexed in MEDLINE or PubMed and so would not generally be considered a legitimate part of the biomedical literature. The publisher (Herbert Publications, Hyderabad, India) is also on Beall's List of "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers": http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

Predatory publishing does exist, but its damage is mitigated by the fact that papers are judged primarily on the reputation of the journal or publication they're in. That is, an academic in a given field will know all the highest-tier journal titles, and have a good knowledge of mid and lower tiers -- new or obscure titles will always draw scepticism. Previous blogs or reports with the same conclusions: [0] http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102 [1] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/7/151235-predatory-scholarly-publis… [2] http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32426/title/Pred… And a(n incomplete) list of predatory publishers is maintained here: [3] http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

Academic phishing is real and often overlooked. Here are the articles in question: http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/05/05/omics-publishing-launches-new-brand-… http://scholarlyoa.com/2013/01/25/omics-predatory-meetings/ http://scholarlyoa.com/2013/02/12/omics-ineptly-uses-social-media-to-p… That blog is hilarious, I often forward him tips from academic spam I receive. The niches just get weirder and stranger all the way down. What's really strange is that it seems to work.. someone might recognize this eventually, and nab some researchers as advisors on fake startups to boost "credibility".

The point of this, as posted previously, is given in this 2014 post: https://scholarlyoa.com/2014/11/20/bogus-journal-accepts-profanity-lac… (also previously submitted to HN as http://www.vox.com/2014/11/21/7259207/scientific-paper-scam) Essentially, predatory journals spam scientists, seeking to publish their paper for a small fee. Someone wrote this in 2005 as a joke response to spammy conference invites, then someone else more recently sent this to one of those predatory journals. >After receiving a spam email from the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, Dr. Peter Vamplew of Federation University Australia’s School of Engineering and Information Technology sent the anti-spam article as a reply to the spam email without any other message, expecting that they might open it and read it, but not that it would be considered for publication. >To his surprise, the journal accepted the paper and sent him an acceptance email that had two PDF attachments. One was a formal statement of acceptance and the second was the reviewer report. >It’s clear from examining the reviewer report that the same filled-out form is used for most or all submissions. Certainly, no peer review was completed despite the journal’s claim to be a peer reviewed journal. The acceptance indicates that the next step for Associate Professor Vamplew is to wire USD $150 to the bank account of Tej Pal Singh, and the paper will be published, but I don’t think he’ll be doing…