[GOAL] Re: Bohannon study: No damage

Sun Oct 13 23:18:22 BST 2013

This reply by Stevan is correct.  However, I think I can add another
dimension.

It may help to look at the related area of publication in conference
proceedings, which are regarded at the same level as journals in some
disciplines, principally computer science and engineering. There are
prestigious conferences, some of which are OA and some of which are not.
There are also junk conferences not worth attending, some of which are OA
and some are not. The proceedings may be OA or not, independent of quality.

The junk conferences long predated the invention of gold journals, because
conference organizers gain profits from author-side registration fees, and
kickbacks from venues. Gaining a few extra dollars for an APC (and no peer
reviewing) for an article in the proceedings is icing on the cake because
the author wants article acceptance in order to be funded to attend. This
sort of abuse of ‘peer-review’ and publishing pressure has been with us even
before the Internet, and is likely to be with us long in to the future. The
literature on stings such as Bohannan’s is large!

Arthur Sale

University of Tasmania

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf
Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Monday, 14 October 2013 6:54 AM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Bohannon study: No damage

On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Jacinto Dávila <jacinto.davila at gmail.com>
wrote:

I wouldn't dare challenging Prof  Harnad's well informed opinion on this,
but it seems that a "conclusion" is 
being  established and I put [conclusion] in quotes because it is not
logical: OA is bad.

This sting is a carefully planned positioning (marketing) exercise. 

I don't think John Bohannon was aiming to sting OA -- just pay-to-publish
junk-journals.

John only tested pay-to-publish Gold OA journals. He did not test non-OA
pay-to-publish journals (there are few), nor non-OA subscription journals
(i.e., the vast majority of journals, amongst which there are no doubt some
junk journals too).

Hence John's conclusion is not about OA, but about pay-to-publish.

Nevertheless, I think that if he had tested non-OA subscription journals --
matched for subject matter, age, size and impact factor -- he would probably
have found a lower proportion of junk journals. (Whereas if he had tested
non-OA pay-to-publish journals -- if he could find any matching ones -- he
might have found as high a proportion of junk journals, or possibly even
higher.)

So the problem is probably pay-to-publish rather than OA. (He didn't test
any non-pay-to-publish OA journals either, and there are lots of those.) 

And certainly there is nothing 'bad' about Green OA, since that's just any
subscription journal at all, after an author has self-archived his article
to make it Green OA.

It would be nice if we could all agree to stop conflating OA with Gold OA!

It would also be good to distinguish pay-to-publish Gold OA from
non-pay-to-publish Gold OA, though it has to be admitted that the Gold OA
journals that most of the controversy (not just Junk, but Finch) is about
are the pay-to-publish Gold OA journals, whether junk or not.

Simple stuff, but you still have to keep it sorted in your mind...

Stevan Harnad

On 2013-10-13 10:39 AM, "David Prosser" <david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> I don't follow the logic of this.
>
> Authors want to get the prestige of publication in journals.  Authors of
very poor papers know they can only get published in journals where the peer
review is lax (perhaps to the point of non-existence).
>
> Even if they make their papers Green OA, authors of poor papers will still
want 'prestige', so they will still look for a journal that will publish
their papers.  Whatever the status of green OA, poor journals will continue
to exist for as long as their are authors writing poor papers.
>
> David
>  
>
> On 12 Oct 2013, at 20:28, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>
>> The inevitable sensationalism inspired by the Bohannon Sting will soon
die down, doing no damage to science, scholarship or peer review. And
insofar as OA is concerned, it helps bring out an point about pay-to-publish
junk journals riding the growing wave of clamor for OA:
>>
>> I would be surprised if there weren't subscription journals that would
have accepted the Bohannon bogus paper for publication too. 
>>
>> But I would be even more surprised if as high a proportion of
subscription journals -- matched for field, age, size and impact-factor --
would have accepted Bohannon's bogus paper as did the pay-to-publish OA
journals ("Gold OA"). 
>>
>> Subscription journals have to maintain enough of an appearance of peer
review to sustain their subscriptions. Pay-to-publish Gold OA journals just
have to maintain enough of an appearance of peer review to attract authors
(and maybe the lure of pay-to-publish is enough to attract many authors in
our publish-or-perish world without even the appearance of peer review,
especially when the journal choice is justified by the fashionable allure --
or excuse -- of the journal's being an OA journal).
>>
>> This problem would not be remedied by just lowering Gold OA journal
publication fees. 
>>
>> Nor is it a symptom of a general problem with peer review (though peer
review could certainly do with some upgrading in any case). 
>>
>> It is a specific problem of peer review standards of pay-to-publish Gold
OA journals at a time when there is still far too little OA and when most
journals are still subscription journals, most authors are still confused
about OA, many think that OA is synonymous with Gold OA journals, and, most
important, there are not yet enough effective mandates from research funders
and institutions that require authors to make all their papers OA by
depositing them in their institutional OA repositories ("Green OA"),
regardless of where they were published. 
>>
>> If it were mandatory to make all papers Green OA, all authors would
simply deposit their peer-reviewed final drafts in their institutional OA
repositories, free for all, immediately upon acceptance for publication.
They would not have to pay to publish in Gold OA journals unless they
especially wished to. Once all journal articles were being made Green OA in
this way, institutions would be able to cancel all their journal
subscriptions, which would in turn force all journals to cut costs and
convert to Gold OA publishing at a much lower fee than is being charged now
by OA journals: post-Green Fair Gold instead of today's pre-Green Fool's
Gold. 
>>
>> But, most important, the reason the Fair Gold fee would be much lower is
that the only remaining service that journals (all of them having become
Gold OA) would be performing then, post-Green, would be peer review. All
access-provision and archiving would be offloaded onto the global network of
Green OA institutional repositories -- so no more print or PDF editions or
their costs. And for just peer review, journals would no longer be charging
for publishing (which would then just amount to a tag certifying that the
article had been accepted by journal J): they would be charging only for the
peer review. 
>>
>> And each round of peer review (which peers do for free, by the way, so
the only real cost is the qualified editor who evaluates the submissions,
picks the referees, and adjudicates the referee reports -- plus the referee
tracking and communication software) would be paid for on a "no-fault"
basis, per round of peer review, whether the outcome was acceptance,
rejection, or revision and resubmission for another (paid) round of peer
review.
>>
>> Unlike with today's Fool's Gold junk journals that were caught by
Bohannon's sting, not only will no-fault post-Green, Fair-Gold peer-review
remove any incentive to accept lower quality papers (and thereby reduce the
reputation of the journal) -- because the journal is paid for the peer
review service in any case -- but it will help make Fair-Gold OA costs even
lower, per round of peer review, because it will not wrap the costs of the
rejected or multiply revised and re-refereed papers into the cost of each
accepted paper, as they do now.
>>
>> So post-Green Fair Gold will not only reduce costs but it will raise
peer-review standards.
>>
>> None of this is possible, however, unless Green OA is effectively
mandated by all research institutions and funders worldwide, first. 
>>
>> Harnad, S. (2013) The Science Peer-Review "Sting": Where the Fault Lies.
Open Access Archivangelism 1059
>>
>> ________ (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity
Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8). 
>>
>> ______ (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In:
Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic
Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106. 
>>
>> ______ (1998) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov.
1998), Exploit Interactive 5 (2000): and in Shatz, B. (2004) (ed.) Peer
Review: A Critical Inquiry. Rowland & Littlefield. Pp. 235-242.
>>

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