[GOAL] Re: Who benefits from for-profit open access publishing? A case study of Hindawi and Egypt

Sat Apr 11 11:23:40 BST 2015

I completely agree with David. Let me add a few comments. Although they are coming at it from different angles, it seems to me that this is where Heather Morrison and Jeffrey Beall converge in what looks like thinly veiled disdain for open access publishers from regions outside N America and Europe. Perhaps Hindawi could be legitimately criticised (no publisher is ever beyond criticism), as David says, but to assume that because they are based in Egypt they are bound to be parochial and aim to serve the Egyptian academic community more than other academic communities is preposterous. Science is global, and science publishers are. 

If a highly successful publisher like Hindawi is a danger, it is not to Egypt or to the worldwide academic community, but mainly to traditional publishers. After all, they are showing that a company can be successful and profitable with open access publishing at a cost level that few in the western world can match. The fact that they are based in a non-Western country should not be held against them. The fact is that most of the large traditional publishers either have the majority of their activities in non-Western countries, of have outsources those activities to such countries. However, they don’t seem to share the benefit of the massive savings they realise by doing that, with the academic community. If they did, their average revenue per article would be considerably less than what it is now: in the order of four times the high-end APC Hindawi charges. I take the view that it would most likely be beneficial to the entire world academic community if more global scientific open access publishing outfits were to spring up in areas like Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

> However, [Hindawi’s] success is not accompanied by obvious benefits to Egypt’s own research and researchers.

Apart from the obvious fact that their content is freely accessible at no cost to the reader, as David has already remarked. What could certainly be said is that the subscription-based publishers obviously make life very much more difficult for researchers and research in Egypt (and anywhere else for that matter) than it should be.

Jan Velterop

Sent from Jan Velterop's iPhone. Please excuse for brevity and typos. 

> On 11 Apr 2015, at 10:12, David Prosser <david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> I’m rather confused by this blog post.  If the argument is that Egypt should invest more in research and build greater safeguards to intellectual and academic freedom then I’m sure that we would all agree wholeheartedly.
> 
> However, it appears to be trying to make a point about Hindawi and for-profit OA publishing.  Here, for me, it fails.
> 
> The main argument is that as the most expensive APC Hindawi charges is high compared to academic salaries in Egypt there is a problem with for-profit OA publishing.  There are a number of points here.
> 
> 1.  I know of no country where APCs are mainly paid from academic salaries.  In the same way that centrifuges, reagents, etc., etc. tend not to be paid for from salaries.  They are mainly paid from research grants and so the comparison to salaries strikes me as meaningless.  (Unless the situation is different in Egypt and all research equipment is paid for personally by researchers.)  Now, it may be that the highest APC Hindawi charges is out of reach of research grants, but let’s use a sensible metric.
> 
> 2. The authors, no doubt to make an ideological point, have chosen the highest APC Hindawi charges.  It is easy to find journals published by Hindawi that charge APCs of a fifth of that quoted.  Four days’ salary for a professor rather than a month - if that were a meaningful metric.
> 
> 3. Publishing is international - Not all companies price their products exclusively for a home market.  We shouldn’t be surprised when this happens in publishing.  (Although I note that there are papers published by Egyptian authors in Hindawi’s journals.)
> 
> 4. For me, the most striking omission is that in asking the question ‘who benefits?’ and in focusing in on Egypt there is complete silence on the issue of Egyptian researchers (and citizens more widely) as readers.  The whole point of open access is to widen readership and to make papers available to all interested readers, not just to those who can afford subscriptions.  The papers published by Hindawi are now available to the intellectually curious in Egypt (as elsewhere).  These curious readers now have access to a corpus of material that they might never otherwise have been able to read.  I would have thought that deserved a mention in any discussion of ‘who benefits?’.  Unless the main driver was to make an ideological point against APCs rather than to answer the question.
> 
> 
> So, it would appear that both Egyptian authors and readers, and international authors and readers, benefit from for-profit open access publishing.  Should there be more repositories? Of course.  Should Egyptian researchers use them more? Of course.  Should there be a wide variety of gold open access providers, including those that make no charge to authors? Of course.  Does the academic, and wider, community benefit from for-profit open access publishers? Of course!
> 
> (For full disclosure I would say that I have liked everybody I have met over the years who works for Hindawi and I admire how the company made the transition form subscription to open access publisher.)
> 
> David
> 
> 
> 
> On 10 Apr 2015, at 21:42, Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca<mailto:Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>> wrote:
> 
> a blogpost by Jihane Salhab & Heather Morrison
> 
> Abstract
> 
> The highly successful Egypt-based open access publisher Hindawi is presented as a model of quality publishing and commercial success. However, this success is not accompanied by obvious benefits to Egypt’s own research and researchers. Even in the best-case scenario for academics in Egypt’s public university system, it would take three month’s salary for a full professor to pay the $1,500 USD OA APC of Hindawi’s high-end Disease Markers. Egypt’s largest public university, Cairo University, has no institutional repository. Fortunately for Egyptian researchers, there are open access journals that do not charge APCs, and not all open access repositories are institutional repositories. Open access may not be the most salient issue for Egyptian researchers at any rate. It is not clear that the pre-revolutionary state interference with research detailed in a 2005 Human Rights Watch report has been resolved, and the need to take on other work due to low salaries leaves many academics with little to no time to do research. In this instance, commercial success is not correlated with social benefit.
> 
> Details here:
> http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/04/10/who-is-served-by-for-profit-gold-open-access-publishing-a-case-study-of-hindawi-and-egypt/
> 
> best,
> 
> --
> Dr. Heather Morrison
> Assistant Professor
> École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
> University of Ottawa
> Desmarais 111-02
> 613-562-5800 ext. 7634
> Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: Open Access Scholarship
> http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
> http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
> Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca<mailto:Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>
> 
> 
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