The Dot-Gold Rush for Open Access

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SUMMARY: Because it is relatively easy to start up fleets of "peer-reviewed journals" online with minimal experience, answerability, quality-control, cost, or risk, because the call for Open Access (OA) is getting stronger, because traditional journals are perceived as getting weaker, and because there is still widespread ignorance and inertia regarding the fastest and surest way of providing OA (Green OA self-archiving), there seems to be a growing "dot-gold rush" of Gold OA journal start-ups, based on spamming the research community to solicit editors, referees and authors. Needless to say, these antics are giving OA a bad name. The eloquent and insightful chronicler of the OA movement, Richard Poynder, is doing some investigative journalism on this fast-feeding frenzy and looking for help from the research community.

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On Mon, 14 Jul 2008, Richard Poynder wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

Thanks to everyone who helped me when I was writing about Bentham Science Publishers. I am now researching another OA publisher [Scientific Journals International], and would be grateful for any further help list members might be able to provide...

There seems to be a growing epidemic of fast Gold-OA journal-fleet start-ups, based on next to no scholarly/scientific or publishing experience or expertise, and relying heavily on online spamming. The numbers are high enough to have inspired a fraud-alert/spam-warning series on Guenther Eysenbach's blog and now Richard Poynder's investigative studies.

The warning sign is always fleet start-ups (in both sense of "fleet"), from Elsevier/Springer wannabes: By quickly starting a bunch of journals, you can treat them all as a database, and treat peer review as just a matter of automatized software. Journals can now be irregular, "publishing" papers singly as they are are accepted, rather than bundling them by regular issue. (This is just fine, for a journal with an established track record for quality, but for a start-up fleet, it means journals can come and go, the author and archival perenity be damned: it's survival of the fittest -- fittest to generate either self-sustaining revenue for the publisher or a quick pull-out...) An honest new journal start-up is always just one journal.

Here are some observations on this unwelcome phenomenon that risks giving OA a bad name:

(1) Gold OA fever (a general yearning for OA that has sometimes taken the specific form of an urgent desire for Gold OA journals) has created a climate in which some people think there is money to be made by starting up new OA journals. They think that because most established journals are currently unwilling to convert to Gold, they can attract their authors away from them (and charge the authors for it).

(2) Some of the Gold OA startups are completely inexperienced in peer-reviewed journal publishing and peer review. They imagine it is largely a matter of cheap online solicitations, with minimal human involvement and maximal reliance on mass emailing, to solicit editors, reviewers and authors.

(3) Some of them do minimal, low-quality peer review, and some of them (like SJI) perhaps next to none.

(4) These quick-Gold start-ups will all fail, in short order (as many conventional journal start-ups also do, in an already-saturated market). Electronic start-ups (whether OA or non-OA) are so much cheaper -- or so it seems to the dot-com-minded entrepreneur -- that it is now a low-risk, minimal-investment venture to try to "create" a fleet of journals through nothing but email spamming.

(5) The reason the startups will fail is not just that their practices are shoddy and their quality standards low or nonexistent, but because what research needs is free access to the contents of the established peer-reviewed journals, with their track-records for quality-control and selectivity, not fly-by-night start-ups that try to attract their authors away from the established journals. (We already have more than enough journals, and the market is saturated. What is needed is better selection for quality, not greater quantity.)

(6) The fact that well-meaning research funders and even universities are foolishly willing to throw money at Gold OA (instead of just mandating Green OA) is also helping to encourage these quick-money Dot-Gold fast-OA start-ups.

None of this is doing the reputation of either OA or Gold OA or even peer-reviewed journal publishing any good. Gold OA fever and the economies of the online medium attract quick-money-minded know-nothings to what used to be an honorable scholarly/scientific trade: peer-reviewed journal publishing. It must be admitted that the trade had already been in decline since before OA and even before the online medium, with (some) publishers becoming big, price-inflated fleets of journals, many with low peer-review standards. But the Dot-Gold Rush has carried this to a grotesque extreme, because it did not even have to worry about building up a subscriber base by generating a credible journal: It just charged authors, already eager for publication, and if the articles ended up in a soon-dead "journal", no skin off the "publisher's" nose.

It has always been part of the strategy of starting up a journal to attract a distinguished (and sometimes unused) "Editorial Board" so as to attract, in turn, authors and reviewers. Authors have always been lured by the need and greed to publish, trading off the fact that a journal was new with the fact that it was hungrier to accept one's paper. Scholars and scientists have always accepted to join new journals' editorial boards (usually after being assured the workload would be light) for the added luster it gave their CVs. Referees refereed willingly for free, partly out of superstition, partly out of duty, partly out of interest in the subject matter.

(None of this is new: I myself have done every single one of these things: started up new journals via chain letter, joined start-up editorial boards, published articles in start-up (and later discontinued) journals, etc. The only difference is that these practices, which are legitimate up to a point, as long as the motivation is scientific/scholarly and not financial or self-promotional, are now being taken to a grotesque extreme because of the ease of entry into online publishing and a perceived instability in the traditional journal publishing trade, owing to the growing clamor for OA.)

Dot-Gold startups will come and go, but alas the long wait for OA is still on, and these unwelcome diversions and digressions are not doing OA's image or progress any good at all. (And meanwhile Green OA self-archiving, from which there is no money to be made at all, still languishes, underexploited, waiting for its day...)

Richard Poynder is doing a great service by helping to distance OA explicitly from these tempting and growing abuses.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum