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?