Publish and Pay

There is a growing trend towards open access academic publishing where researchers have to pay for publication. Open access is in principle a good idea but the idea of authors rather than subscribers footing the bill has its dangers.

Firstly, it poses a threat to new academic journals in emerging countries. There are, I suspect quite a few researchers who would find it more convenient to spend a few hundred dollars, especially if comes out of grant money, for speedy and "prestigious" international publication rather than writing for a local journal with limited impact.

Secondly, there is a definite threat to standards if criteria for publication are to relaxed or perhaps even abandoned altogether. 

Recently, Philip Davis and Kent Anderson sent a totally nonsensical computer generated paper to the Open Information Science Journal. It was accepted, supposedly after peer review, with a request for the payment of $800 in author's fees. In this case, at least, the peer review process had apparently been dropped altogther.

For more information see The Scientist and the "authors'" blog, The Scholarly Kitchen.

In all fairness, it must be pointed out that another computer generated paper submitted to another journal run by the same company journal was rejected and that one reviewer at least figured out what was going on.

Still, this does have disturbing implications. If publication becomes influenced or even determined by ability to pay then we are heading for the complete corruption of the peer review system.

It would be a good idea if universities refused to consider articles in pay for publication journals as evidence for selection or promotion. Perhaps also, Scopus and other databases could list such journals in a separate category.

Anyway, here is an extract from the first paper:

"In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9]."