There are more than 50 questionable open access publishers on Jeffrey Beall’s List of Predatory Open-Access Publishers.   Some questionable journals publish independently of any publisher.  How has this disease spread? Here are my thoughts and evidence:

1. Plug-and-play content management such as Open Journal  Systems (OJS) provides a no-cost easy way to set up a professional journal publishing platform.  For better or worse, this respected attempt by the Open Knowledge Project aimed at ” improving the scholarly and public quality of research” has simultaneously offered a fast-track opportunity for publisher copycats to launch an “open access” scholarly publishing operation. To be fair to OJS, there are more than a dozen publishing software packages listed in the Open Access Directory launch by Simmons College.
2. Nearly every journal concerned with their reputation in fields such as medicine makes considerable effort to adopt a credible peer review mechanism, but the traditional method of author-blinded reviewing does not provide a way for the submitting author to see the identity of the reviewer who detected deficiencies or judged their research deficient.  A journal admitting the lack of sufficiently knowledgeable reviewers may ask an author to provide names and contact information of potential reviewers in her/his specialty, creating a different kind of competing interest.
3. When one of the questionable publishers recently sent me an email solicitation to publish in one of their journals, I also noticed that they charged an author-processing charge (APC) of $400-$600.  That amount is very low, considering that open access journals with strong peer review reputations have a business model that requires 200%-500% of that amount for an APC.  Even if publication costs other than peer review can be reduced to lower the APC, maintaining a system of credible reviewers that provide careful unbiased analysis is an ongoing expense of time and effort.
4. A code of conduct published by the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is voluntary, and the OASPA itself has not taken fellow publishers to task about the predatory evidence that seems to exist for more than 50 questionable open access publishers
5. The stagnant global economy has created the largest unemployment rates in modern history, and would-be entrepreneurs with computer skills and time on their hands could find opportunity by simulating a closed system of peer review and rapid publishing turn-around, satisfying  the need of researchers to find a publisher when competition for a place in important journals is very competitive.

So the problem is that there are plenty of would-be biomedical open access publishers, but on closer inspection many do not meet a trust-able standard.  Perhaps there are genuine publishing efforts and a desire to be removed from the category of questionable or predatory.  I think there is something to do to create trust that even goes beyond aligning with the OASPA code of conduct:  adopt careful and scientifically-based peer review that is open and available for authors, readers, and the institutions that are providing APC subsidies as part of the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE).

I encountered open peer review more than 9 years ago, as the editor of a new open access journal on the Biomed Central (BMC) platform.  BMC announced that journals could consider publishing the peer reviews as part of an article’s history, signed by the review authors. The editorial staff I initially led declined to make open peer review mandatory, but at least one BMC journal has embraced it. Here is their own description:

Biology Direct offers a novel system of peer review, allowing authors to select suitable reviewers from the journal’s Editorial Board; making the peer-review process open rather than anonymous; and making the reviewers’ reports public, thus increasing the responsibility of the referees and eliminating sources of abuse in the refereeing process.

To see how this works in practice, take for example an article from 2011: Not all transmembrane helices are born equal: Towards the extension of the sequence homology concept to membrane proteins. The reviewers’ comments are signed and in the public view. Here is one:

Reviewer’s report 1

Shamil Sunyaev, Division of Genetics, Dept. of Medicine, Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School

This manuscript investigates differences in sequence complexity and hydrophobicity between transmembrane helices serving purely structural role and transmembrane helices with additional functional roles. On the practical side, the analysis of sequence complexity and hydrophobicity is able to identify transmembrane helices that are responsible for spurious sequence search hits as opposed to functional transmembrane helices that are useful for homology search. The manuscript is a follow up on an earlier manuscript by the same authors that suggested suppressing transmembrane segments in domain models to increase sensitivity and specificity of remote homology search. The results are of interest both in terms of protein evolution and in terms of practical utility for sequence similarity searches.

Authors’ response

We thank the reviewer for highlighting these points. Even if the straightforward, silent extension of computing homology via sequence similarity from globular domains to membrane proteins is probably correct in a number of cases, it is important to identify this uncertainty as blind assumption and to derive criteria aimed at excluding situations when assigning homology in this simplified manner is not justified.

I have two minor comments:

1) Since sequence complexity and hydrophobicity seem to be correlated, I wonder why is not the inverse co-variance matrix included in the Z-score.

Authors’ response

If the distribution of the points (x̃Φ,x̃c)(we use the normalized forms x̃Φ=xΦ−μΦ∕σΦand x̃c=xc−μc∕σc) is considered in the hydrophobicity/complexity plot (Figure 3A), we find that most of the points representing real TMs are either of high hydrophobicity/low complexity (simple TMs or of less hydrophobicity and higher complexity. The two alternative quadrants (low hydrophobicity/low complexity or high hydrophobicity/high complexity) are not much populated and, from the viewpoint of the concept developed in this article, it is not very clear how to deal with them meaningfully. Of course, one can develop analytically more sophisticated expressions for the Z-score as proposed by the reviewer and, maybe, it might prove useful in the future. Here, we wanted to have a very simple form of the Z-score that is symmetric across the four quadrants. At the end, we are only after TMs with low Z-score.

2) On a more philosophical note, I would not state that “homology” equals to common evolutionary origin but rather than ‘homology” is a surprisingly high level of similarity that cannot be explained by a functional constraint and, therefore, indicative of potentially common evolutionary origin.

Authors’ response

We fully agree with the reviewer’s view. The problem is in the practical detail: How do we know that there is no functional constraint for query sequences (whether there is convergent evolution or common ancestry)? From the sequence analytic perspective, homology is usually inferred from easily derived similarity measures of aligned sequences because there is no other direct measure of common ancestry, not because this criterion is especially elegant or rigorous. The practice becomes questionable when this caveat is forgotten.

It may occur to you that a well-written review becomes a scholarly publication, much in the way a book review does in other disciplines.

One potential downside is the same concern raised by my own editorial staff. In a relatively small community of like-minded professionals, would an honest review that appeared harsh not be appreciated in the spirit of improvement and/or considered a threat to friendship? I guess we have to ask ourselves why more open access journals did not adopt open peer review, once someone as respected as NCBI Director David Lipman became the editor of Biology Direct.

You can see from the example above that editorial guidance for the reviewer can also filter out harshness and really create an opportunity for dialogue that improves the overall process of research in a particular discipline, perhaps even pleasant exchanges after publication.

I saw an account of three major publishers’ copyright infringement law suit filed against open education publisher Boundless Learning (BL) in the April 5th Chronicle of Higher Education blog.   If you launching an open education startup, viral word-of-mouth marketing is the inexpensive alternative to advertising.  But then you attract venture capital funding and a law suit in the same week,  articles show up in The Chronicle and even TechCrunch.  Free publicity…. priceless.

What’s the beef the publishers have with BL?  They accuse BL of:

• Stealing the creative expression of others
• Violating intellectual property rights
• Exploiting and profiting from Plaintiffs’ successful textbooks by making and distributing the free versions of those books
• Build a business upon Plaintiffs’ intellectual property rights

The example cited in The Chronicle article is about a popular biology textbook:

To illustrate this claim of intellectual theft, the publishers’ complaint points to the Boundless versions of several textbooks, including Biology, a textbook authored by Neil Campbell and Jane Reece. The Boundless alternative, the complaint alleges, is guilty of copying the printed material’s layout and engaging in what the complaint calls “photographic paraphrasing.” In one chapter of the printed book, for instance, the editors chose to illustrate the first and second laws of thermodynamics using pictures of a bear running and a bear catching a fish in its mouth. Boundless’s substitute text uses similar pictures to illustrate the same concepts—albeit Creative Commons-licensed images hosted on Wikipedia that include links to the source material, in accordance with the terms of the open license.  (source)

source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aptmetaphor/2316773059/

This bear is not running or catching a fish. This bear is bushed. I think this argument is too. At least two general categories of material are generally not eligible for federal copyright protection, according to the government’s Copyright Basics (pdf):

• titles, names, short phrases, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring; mere listings of ingredients or contents
• ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration.

The idea of a bear’s physical activity being used as an analogy for the laws of thermodynamics is not copyrightable.  And if the bears are different and the other diagrammatic expressions integrated with the bear not identical, is this any different than the similarity that already takes place between competing commercial textbook publishers trying to illustrate principles of thermodynamics?

Anyway, this is all speculation based on the outlines of a lawsuit and  a copies of an open textbook that is still effectively gated for currently in invite-only beta. BL is happy to have all this attention and the roll of David against a Goliath consortium.   There are also decent questions about the quality of the BL products, and I have my own opinion about certain free open access textbook publishers around quality and the opportunity to exploit scholarly authors.

I was looking at the website for the open access publisher PAGEPress and noticed their journals offered a very competitively priced author processing fee.  The price for publication of each article in our journal is EUR 350,00.

In attempting to understand how their implementation of open access publishing could be done so reasonably, I went to their detailed page on their article processing charges(APC).  At the end, they say:

At the end of peer review all accepted papers are processed for publication: at this time PAGEPress also require payments; once payments are received and all versions of the paper are approved, the paper is published.

Putting myself in the position of a biomedical author, I went to one of their journals, Pediatric Reports, and I found the link for authors guidelines.

Yes, that little detail about an additional EUR 500,00 to get your submission reviewed in four weeks.  Four weeks is hardly rapid and more like average for many open access operations.  The way this fee is presented without any clarification of what time period the non-fast-track is, IMHO, designed to imply that an article will get the fullest consideration with the payment of that additional fee.  Together with the stated APC, an EUR 850,00 is still competitive with many well-established open access publishers. There is also no clarity as to when this Fast-Track review fee is due, but a logical inference would be prior to peer review.

This is one example of a hidden fee in the publishing environment that some would consider predatory,  a bait-and-switch tactic where a low-ball APC  is in reality more, if you want to get your research in the open rapidly (one of the main selling points of open access).

Fortunately, for the gold open access industry, I was hard pressed to find a similar instance of a supplemental fee to accelerate consideration.

Well, if you quibble about whether this exercise reached a minimum quorum for voting, then you probably should have voted.   Anyway, with 6 votes cast in the attempt to figure out the greatest source of open access embarrassment to date, the winner by a  4:2 landslide is….predatory open access.

Frankly, I ran this poll expecting the publisher I cast aspersions toward to stuff the ballot box with a laptop in a Rijeka coffee shop, but that does not seem to be the case. Yes, this was a rather tawdry comparison, but  it does in fact give peer-reviewed Chinese Medicine a bit more credibility (less embarrassment).

Now that I have this out of my system, the next blog entry will be on open access and evolutionary biology. Out of the gutter and into mainstream biological science.

I really don’t care if InTechWeb has published 340+ books, 25,000+ authors, +2.5 million downloaded papers, all of them open access.

I also don’t care that there are 25,029 persons in Facebook that claim to like them.

There are places in the world, during these hard economic times, that specialize in creating a virtual population or marketing campaign for compensation.  Where you can pay people to click and download, even create email and facebook accounts, in order to present a facade of acceptability.  When you give your product away, there is no recourse to object and ask for a refund if what you find turns out to be sloppy, scientifically inferior, or perhaps dangerous.  But I am disturbed that more members of the open access advocacy community are not shining a brighter flashlight on InTechWeb.

The only thing that is real, I believe, are the authors.  Maybe some of them really believe that this is a genuine open access publisher. Let’s accept for the moment the claim that InTechWeb has 7,500 authors.  This operation is, after all, subsidized by author processing charges (APC):  “With regards to your payments, InTech will provide a secure payment gateway to help you complete your payment safely and securely keeping your personal, professional and fnancial informaton safe.”

I can only find a visible page with an APC of 840 EUROS ($1165) for InTech journal articles, but we can probably assume a similar fee is presented to all authors, as these InTech books are little more than article anthologies.  Let’s say that each author paid $1165 for their first article or book chapter.  We are talking about more that $8,000,000. 

Imagine how you would amass a fortune in an online publishing pyramid…In a classic multilevel marketing scheme, someone with the intent to enrich themselves would induce APC authors invested in their scholarship with a reward to find new authors that could pay the initation fee, or first APC.  Perhaps the reward to an author forming a down-line would be compensation or discount for every new author that is recruited.  And in classic multilevel marketing, when the scheme collapses, the new authors that just paid the full APC for a misrepresented product fear the embarrassment from their mistaken judgement and simply walk away with a loss and keep quiet.  This is just my imagination, of course.

When InTechWeb announced their most recent set of book releases, I just had to take a closer look at the one biomedical title:  Modern Pacemakers – Present and Future.   Looking at the first chapter, Information Technology Aspects of Integrated Cardiac Rhythm Disease Management, I noticed a computer-generated list of related articles to the left:

Do you see anything related to cardiac rhythm disease management?   Let’s see, we have Fungicide Effectiveness, Urban Flood Control, Sustainable Fisheries Management, etc. 

InTechWeb seems to be about style more than substance.  Not much depth.  Less than careful editing.  It kind of makes sense that they would give away what they would be hard-pressed to sell.

To refresh your memory, I have identified the open access publisher InTech of being a predator.  Their prey are the rapidly expanding global community of time-pressured early-career academics that need to “publish or perish.”

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/booshank/

Intech charges them an “open access” article processing charge, accepts their submission, and quickly packages the individual research into digital monographs that seem no worse than benign.   The research author(s) are now published and retain their copyright.  And they might even get cited.  What’s wrong with with this merry system?

Since my concern is with biomedical open access, I took a careful look at InTech’s  health and medicine collection of freely downloadable texts. [My first identification of InTech predatory tendency in early October was also in this category].   I opened up the general medicine text on Health Management, recently published in September 2010.   Here is the introduction…the one paragraph introduction.

Feel free to disagree with me, but this editor seems to be struggling with finding a critical research common denominator for the articles.  In fact, I read it three times and decided a high school student probably wrote it.  The stated editor has not a single scholarly article to his credit, at least according to my check of a couple of biomedical databases. Here’s the table of contents for Health Management:

Now take a look at the last article assigned to this misbegotten anthology.  Yes, I think this guy Steve must be the spouse or friend of someone who spotted InTech’s very liberal publishing policy and decided to test the open access system. Sure enough, it only took putting Health Management in the title to get this ode to the health of automobile customer ownership into global open access print.

I really hope they try to explain themselves by submitting a polite comment.

I found a previously undetected open access publisher with a website, blog, youtube channel, and even a twitter feed called intechweb.org.  The also have a selection of open access textbooks, including one on medical robotics.

I went to their web site and confirmed that the publisher used a gold open access model of an author fee for chapter or article submissions.  The medical robotics textbook has 37 chapters,  showing no particular organizational principle and containing an editorial introduction of only 273 words.  The editor has no record of scholarly publishing in standard biomedical databases.

It did not take long with light reviewing to see that many of the rather nice images of robotic surgery actually came from the Intuitive Surgical Product Image Gallery for the  da Vinci_® Si^™ System. Why not the best images,especially when there is no cost involved?

The question of open access publisher credibility begins with something really basic:  enough transparency to see a person called a publisher or editor-in-chief.  When the about page or the contact page does not suggest a specific human being behind the brand, a little bell starts to go off.   Then you find some really unflattering chatter on FriendFeed, and you have a nomination for openbiomed predatory status.  Then you look at the new office, which seems both too quiet and too posed, and you reach the threshold for the predatory open access seal of approval.

Stay away, and imagine this…for the medical robotics textbook, I imagine that the creators of this shell took approximately $22,200 US at $600 per submitted chapter, according to the really unflattering chatter on FriendFeed. If you believe their statistics, it was downloaded 1979 times , but the publishers probable income for one of hundreds of titles is…well…predatory.

At first this blog from iMedPub or oMedPub (take your pick, they seem to be used interchangeably) seemed attractive, at first glance,  and also seemed to be highlighting promising articles from a new open access publisher.

My skepticism began to grow as I conducted an excruciating search for a real person behind “a social publishing house which has been developing services for the international medical community since 1997.”   There was consistent use of a social networking ID representing  iMedPub or oMedPub, but it was not obvious where the list of real staff lived. The blue eyes of those stock photo physicians began to look too blue.

There were only a few articles for the few journals this publisher launched, none indexed in PubMed yet.  At some point  I found the author instructions that eventually mentioned the very reasonable $200 U.S. author fee.  There were editors for these fledgling journals.  There were also some discussions of hybrid open access publishing models that compared unfavorably in the personal economic sense with iMedPub or oMedPub‘s very reasonable $200 U.S. author fee for all the benefits of open access.  The authorship and much of the interlocking websites seems to be aiming at a Spanish-language audience.  There is a social networking site Medicalia.org, an “exclusive next generation social networking service for Medical Students, Residents and Doctors.”  More of those stock photos with very brown eyes.

The numbers attached to the Medicalia.org social networking units seemed anemic.  Well, maybe they are just the new physician social network on the block.

Finally, I went down to a couple of the journal table of contents.   The first, Archives of Medicine, turned out to be a hybrid journal, and when I clicked on an article about low back pain in several Mexican communities, I was asked for a payment of $40 for the privilege of reading it. Whoops.

I tried another journal table of contents that seemed to be open access. the Archives of Clinical Microbiology and an article on listeria bacteria.  Well, if I wanted to download or print this open access article, I would first have to log in with my Facebook ID, leading me to conclude that they were harvesting my identity for their own advertising purpose.

Is iMedPub or oMedPub a predator, or is it just a way of doing the business of medicine for the Spanish-speaking world? I finally clicked on an “About iMedPub” link from an info button and found some names associated with editing:

Maybe something is just lost in translation, but I am obviously not impressed.

Back in May I highlighted Jeffrey Beal’s article in the Charleston Advisor open access archive (the OA archive  is open, unlike the rest of the journal) , an entertaining exposé about several open access publisher websites that don’t describe or respond to questions about peer review or anything else…just register as an author, insert your credit card, and hope for the best.   Yes, it was a sure sign of tarnished gold open access.

Lots of us appreciated Jeffery’s diligence and used various means to circulate his indictment.  That means that as new open access publishers appear, they get  the scrutiny they deserve from more eyeballs, and Jeffrey will get new nominations for potential predatory practices. It didn’t take long for Jeffrey to sound the warning bells again.

The July 2010 issue of the Charleston Advisor contains Jeffrey’s Update: Predatory Open-Access Scholarly Publishers. The first candidate for open access infamy include:

There are several questionable things present in the Medwell Journals website.

What did I notice?

• The contact information page is an ingest form.  Will they get back to you?
• Use of a gmail account for contact on the subscription ordering page.
• No contact information linked or provided for journal editors.
• Must register and enter the manuscript system to see information about fees.
• A “News” page which actually prints news, not from their own journals or business, but from the Journal of Clinical Investigation( see “Genetic Link to Heart Failure.” [a subliminal appeal to legitimacy?!]

The second candidate suggested for scrutiny by Jeffrey is International Research Journals.

What did I notice?

• This blog is about biomedical open access, so I took a closer look at one of the biomedical titles. The Journal of Medicine and Medical Sciences may certainly intend to be as general as the PLoS Medicine, but it will be hard to accomplish with only a single editor on the editorial board,  listed without email or phone number.
• Use of a gmail account on the contact page.  Refreshingly, there are two Nigerian cell phone numbers listed. The weekend had already begun in Nigeria when I used skype to verify the numbers worked.
• The Guide to Authors for the Journal of Medicine and Medical Sciences attempts to describe a unique submission style for paper elements and citation references, apparently in ignorance of the  International Biomedical (Vancouver) style, a well-known international standard that would really simplify the production of manuscripts with citation management tools, as well as provide guidelines for nearly every detail you might forget to think about in setting up a new biomedical journal.
• Author processing fees for articles are published, mostly around $400US – $450US .  Since my first impression is that this at best an immature or amateur start-up,  a competitively low fee is not a bad strategy.  On the other hand, the expenses of what we see in this website are pretty minimal, so what does the money go for? There is no advisory board to lend credibility or confidence.

Anyway, you also have Jeffrey Beal’s  impressions. Thanks, Jeffrey!

Remember a couple of years ago when there were smart and careful investors that nevertheless were tempted by the promise of easy money and a facade of offices and statements that masked a scheme that only truly rewarded the perpetrator? Now we have a term for a possible confidence game being played on scientists seeking a fast track to scholarly publishing: predatory open access publishing.

Michael Cairns’ Personanondata blog article on predatory open access  publishing was based on an article in The Charleston Advisor by Jeffrey Beall. The article is a comparative review that provides a criteria based comparison and rating of nine emerging  gold (author pays) open access publishers. The Charleston Advisor also maintains a collection of their own open access articles, including this review.

Just who are the accused?