Maturing of Open Access
From OpenAccess
Preprint to appear in the December 2008 issue of Information Today (www.infotoday.com)
Maturing of Open Access
With Growth Comes Growing Pains
By Robin Peek
Open access (OA) has had quite a good year. The first international Open Access Day was held on October 14th. Sponsored by SPARC, PLoS, and The Students for Free Culture, the event only demonstrated that open access had crossed into every continent and is now a multi-generational affair. The National Institute of Health’s mandate, despite continuing objections from the publishing lobby, is showing a sharp up-tick in submissions. OA journals are on the increase, both new and toll-access convertion to OA. Institutional repositories are on the rise (625 institutional, 109 cross-institutional to date). The Harvard OA mandate (the planet’s 41st) passed and other major institutions began to follow (57 institutional and funder mandates adopted to date, with 11 more pending). All told, good things.
You might observe however that I no longer refer to OA as a movement any more. In its own right it has achieved its own momentum. Going backwards to return to the pre-OA time at this point is simply not going to happen. Still, with maturity it was inevitable that new issues would emerge, sometimes in the form of the newcomers themselves. Back in the days when OA was still an inchoate movement, before we even called it OA I knew a lot of folks who were participating. Now with the groundswell of interest the names that might flicker past on my screen are unknown or unmeasured. I hope they mean well and will make wise choices, but there are times that I am unsettled or even startled by particular paths that are being struck.
Of particular concern is the management of some of the young OA journals who are now appearing. Without question we have already seen that OA journals can be as well managed as the toll-access journals, whether they operate charging a fee or not. Springer would certainly not be purchasing the BMC journals, which are OA, if they were not well run and well respected
One fundamental question is whether we need many more journals or can actually sustain more than we have. Good journals require good editors, editorial boards, referees, and a flow of quality papers. If a young journal has any chance to gain traction it has to have an editor that is committed to its well-being and who also can gather a board that will add their reputation and editorial assistance to the project. The relationship between editor and editorial board is a critical one and it is industry practice that an entire board submits their resignation when an editor resigns so that a new editor can build a board of his or her choosing.
So knowing how editorial boards work and being a researcher in scholarly journals in particular, I was shocked when I was invited -- as were, apparently, casts of thousands - to join an undertaking called Scientific Journals International (SJI), which seeks to publish a whole lot of journals under an OA model. But it really wouldn’t matter if they were trying to launch a toll-access journal under the same approach. The methodology is flawed.
SJI espouses a “quadruple-blind” peer review system, a model that has never appeared in the scholarly communication literature as needed or desired. To achieve this the editors will not be revealed by this company so that they can’t be influenced (what does that mean, bribery or maybe legal threats? I don’t know.) That is not how the academic game is played. Editors become editors of journals because of the prestige; it’s not something they won’t tell someone about. “I just became editor of this journal, but it’s a secret, don’t tell anyone.” Trust me, that would not last long. Why would anyone want to be a secret editor?
Another practice that these new journal publishers (SJI and others) engage in that they purport to publish, say, “100 journals” but when you visit the web site the majority are mere placeholders with notes like “coming soon” (or even “consider adding your content here.”) And sometimes these so-called journals have named editors and an editorial board. What are these people doing? Is Tinker bell supposed to come along and wave a magic wand and pouf there will be articles? Plain and simple, it is editorial irresponsibility, bordering perhaps on professional misconduct. I hope the day does not come when I must review a promotion report and find the candidate associated with a false front of a journal.
Yes there are people who sign up for these new up-start editorial boards and I am sure for lots of reasons. OA is now cool these days and some may feel they are genuinely helping the cause, even though they lack the reputation, knowledge, and probably the commitment to make a go of these projects.
Of course there are people who will sign up for almost anything to pad a vita. They do this in real life too, either because they are desperate to fatten up their vita for tenure or promotion or to simply fatten up their ego. But in any event these represent a particular waste of time for the individuals involved and for academia in general. Creating a web site is easy, creating a journal, let alone a peer-reviewed one, is not. And perhaps we have to start coming up with standards. A journal should not be considered “published” until it has actual content. And a proposed journal that does not get any content for a year should be dismantled and its editorial group disbanded for failing to deliver. Further if there was no content then there was no journal and it should be stricken from one’s vita. If you never reviewed an article, solicited an article, or even had an editorial board meeting, you have not been on an editorial board; to say otherwise is a falsehood. Maybe that’s what “quadruple blind” peer review was meant to blind us all to.
