[GOAL] Mistaken statements on Gold OA at Publications

Thu Jun 30 16:15:25 BST 2016

Dear all,

Heather - your analysis was just brilliant in my opinion.

Thanks a lot for letting us know about Walt's research, it's really good (and it's kind of a self-published book, not a peer-reviewed article in a reputated OA journal, clap-clap!)

Best,

Miguel Navas-Fernández
PhD Researcher at Universitat de Barcelona
http://www.accesoabierto.net/
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5191-238X
https://es.linkedin.com/pub/miguel-navas-fern%C3%A1ndez/8a/13b/280
https://twitter.com/miguelnavasf

________________________________________
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2016 21:33:07 +0000
From: Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>
Subject: Re: [GOAL] Mistaken statements on Gold OA at Publications
To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org>
Message-ID: <399C0A71-0E35-4DEC-BC4C-B1DFFA030B5C at uottawa.ca>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"

Thank you for catching this and alerting us all, Miguel. Following is an update on some facts, followed by observation / speculation and a practical suggestion.

According to Walt Crawford 71% of the journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals as of December 2015 do not charge article processing fees:
http://waltcrawford.name/goaj1115.pdf

Crawford's research on this question is, to the best of my knowledge as a researcher in this area, the most comprehensive to date. My own research findings include numerous journals from commercial publishers De Gruyter and Elsevier that do not charge article processing fees. Many of these are above and beyond Crawford's data as the journals are not listed in DOAJ (at least, not yet).

Observations / speculations

Biases, both conscious and unconscious, are ubiquitous in research. For many years subscription based publishers simply denied that open access was happening or dismissed the extent to which it was happening. That is why I began and maintain my Dramatic Growth of Open Access series. Some open access proponents see article processing charges (APCs) as the solution to the economic transition to open access. When we humans believe we have the right answer, we tend to dismiss other solutions, and not always deliberately.

There is a common belief that open access equates with the article processing business model. This is held by people who don't particularly like the model as well as by proponents of APCs. For those who are not biased in favour of APC by preferring this model, I suspect that this simply represents a tendency toward a cognitive shortcut, something we humans need to do to cope with the complexity of the world we live in. Bruno Latour describes this as black boxing.

When many peer reviewers share a common but erroneous belief, such as OA publishing being the same as the APC business model, an article can go through what a reviewer and editor sees as rigorous peer review without anyone catching the error. To me this seems logically obvious. Back in the days when people believed the earth was flat no peer reviewer would have found a statement about a flat earth any cause for concern. This is an essential limitation to peer review. In my opinion, peer review is highly overrated. There is a lot of talk today about predatory open access publishers. However, an article whose impact included a popular but false belief linking autism with vaccines was published in a highly regarded peer reviewed journal. We should be asking ourselves, in my opinion, whether blind faith in the peer review process and journal prestige is far more dangerous than predatory journals.

The amount of research being conducted today, due to the number of researchers, has reached a point where I think we should be questioning whether the expectation that a comprehensive literature review is even possible in many areas, or a reasonable expectation of an author who is also a researcher. To me this illustrates why we need a much broader-based transformation of how we conduct and share research than transitioning the existing system online and open access. For example, perhaps we should separate the literature review and the research process so that authors can read and refer to one or a few systematic, up-to-date reviews, ideally kept up to date rather than published in static form, rather than have every author attempt this along with their research. (Nod here to Living Reviews).

Practical suggestion

Commenting on published articles may or may not ever become popular as a method of peer review. However, it is clear to me that in this instance allowing comments and giving authors a chance to correct errors through as many revisions as are needed would be much more helpful than a static "version of record", although previous versions should be retained. Perhaps Publications could add a commenting function?

best,

Heather Morrison

On 2016-06-29, at 3:43 PM, MIGUEL ERNESTO NAVAS FERNANDEZ <miguel.navas at ub.edu>
 wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Perhaps you have read this article:
> Open Access, Innovation, and Research Infrastructure
> http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/4/2/17
>
> It is very interesting, but authors state all the time that Gold OA is about paying APCs, which is false.
>
> They also wrote some statements about the quality of Green OA that are not accurate.
>
> Finally, they introduce Diamond OA as a new model, when it is Gold OA as well.
>
> I don't understand how Publications has allowed this.
>
> More info at on this mistaken statements at:
> https://twitter.com/miguelnavasf/status/748235144180424706
>
> With kind regards,
>
> Miguel Navas-Fern?ndez
> PhD Researcher at Universitat de Barcelona
> http://www.accesoabierto.net/
> http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5191-238X
> https://es.linkedin.com/pub/miguel-navas-fern%C3%A1ndez/8a/13b/280
> https://twitter.com/miguelnavasf
>
>
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>
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