It’s Open Access Week, that time of year when librarians, publishers, and academics alike fill their feeds with the latest hot takes on all things open access (OA). The theme for this year is ‘The Cost of Knowledge’, and the aim as described on the official OA Week website, is to “recognize that accessing and sharing knowledge is a human right”. However, the key question being posed this week is: as costs to access and share knowledge increase, why is this the case and who benefits from it?
The inference here is clearly that publishers are benefiting from the increases in subscription fees and APCs, which, like everything else in a world where inflation is currently higher than in previous years, have been rising inexorably. Looking deeper into the theme, OA Week organisers seem to have been reading Samuel Moore’s influential recent book on OA, ‘Publishing Beyond the Market’ (available to buy in paperback or as open access), which argues for a move away from commercial publishers and towards a system of open commons where knowledge is not just openly shared but also a shared responsibility among faculty and academic institutions.
Commons sense
One aspect of OA that Moore does not cover in depth is predatory journals and books, and how they fit into the commons approach. There are currently over 20,000 questionable journals listed in the Cabells Predatory Reports database, with many more dubious standalone articles, books and other gray literature available through open access. In the early days of OA and predatory journals in the 2000s, a myth was created that OA journals were inherently dodgy as they used the same publishing model as predatory titles – this was patently false, and the myth has largely died away, but what is true is that predatory journals do use (and abuse) the OA model to generate ill-gotten gains for their publishers.
What is the cost of such fraudulent behavior? Cabells estimated a few years ago it was between $75m-$100m a year, using data from the Federal Trade Commission investigation into one of the biggest predatory publishers, OMICS International. However, this data is nearly a decade old and fails to account for three other important costs that are still unknown.
Hide and seek
Firstly, Cabell’s 2020 estimate came from the total APCs authors paid to publish their OA articles in OMICS journals. Much of this money would have come from their funding, but we don’t know how much, or how much came from the OA budgets of universities or were simply paid for by the authors themselves. We really have no idea just how much money is wasted by funders and institutions paying for research that ends up in predatory journals,
The second hidden cost of predatory publishing practices is the fact that often legitimate, well-conducted research with potentially huge benefits has not been validated by peer review and is unlikely to ever be read or cited more widely. Predatory publishers not only pay little or no attention to what they publish, they don’t invest in search engine optimization (SEO) or more recently AI optimization like legitimate publishers. As such, any research published in these journals is effectively lost.
Finally, as highlighted in an article published in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, the cost of predatory journals can be corrosive, as some that are picked up and cited can include bogus science, such as quack COVID cures. Taken together, the hidden cost of knowledge generated by predatory practices taking advantage of the OA model is very real. And just because it is hidden does not mean it doesn’t have a significant negative effect on the academic environment.
