This week is Open Access Week, which you will not have missed due to the slew of Twitter activity, press releases and thought pieces being published – unless you are an author, perhaps. In this week’s blog, Simon Linacre focuses on academic researchers who can often be overlooked by the OA conversation, despite the fact they should be the focus of the discussion.
The other day, I was talking to my 16 year-old son about university, as he has started to think about what he might study and where he might like to go (“Dunno” and “dunno” are currently his favourite subjects and destinations). In order to spark some interest in the thought of higher education, I told him about how great the freedom was to be away, the relaxed lifestyle, and the need to be responsible for your own actions, such as handing in your work on time, even if you had to pull an all-nighter.
“What do you mean ‘hand in your work’?”, he said.
“You know, put my essay in my tutor’s pigeon hole”, I said.
“Why didn’t you just email it? And what do pigeons have to do with it?”, he replied.
Yes, university in the early 90s was a very different beast than today, and I decided to leave pigeons out of the ensuing discussion, but it highlighted to me that while a non-digital university experience is now just a crusty anecdote for students in education today, the transition from the 80s and 90s to the present state of affairs is the norm for those teaching in today’s universities. And in addition, many of the activities and habits that established themselves 20 to 30 years ago and beyond are still in existence, albeit changed to adapt with new technology.
One of these activities that has changed, but remained the same, is of course academic publishing. In the eyes of many people, publishing now will differ incredibly to what it was in the 80s pre-internet – physical vs digital, delayed vs instant, subscription vs open. But while the remnants of the older forms of publishing remain in the shape of page numbers or journal issues, there are still shadows from the introduction of in the early 2000s. This was brought home to me in some webinars recently in Turkey, Ukraine and India (reported here) where the one common question about predatory journals was: “Are all open access journals predatory?”
To those of us who have worked in publishing or to Western academics, this may seem a naïve question. But it is not. Open Access articles – that is, an article which is both free to read on the internet and free to re-use – are still relatively unknown by many academics around the world. In addition, being asked to pay money to publish is still not the norm – most journals listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals do not charge an Article Processing Charge (APC) – and publisher marketing communications are dominated by spam emails from predatory journals rather than press releases during Open Access Week. As such, while the dial may have moved appreciably in Europe and North America following initiatives such as Plan S and high-profile standoffs such as that between the University of California and Elsevier, discussion about OA may not have been replicated elsewhere.
So, while there will be many interesting conversations about Open Access (and delta Think has some fascinating data here), it is also important not to forget many authors may be hearing about it for the first time, or previously may have only heard negative or misleading information. Thankfully, there are plenty of useful resources out there, such as this introduction from Charlesworth Author Services to help authors identify the right OA outlet for their research. And of course, authors should remember that most Open Access journals are not predatory – but to be on the safe side, they can check our Predatory Reports database or criteria to judge for themselves.
