Unethical Practices in Scholarly, Open-Access Publishing

Abstract

IntroductionThe scholarly publishing industry has witnessed the appearance of numerous scholarly, open- access publishers, an innovation that has made many thousands and even millions of scholarly articles available for free over the Internet. The open- access movement has benefitted from the goodwill of countless authors, organizations, funding agencies, and open- access repositories. Unfortunately, as with any large- scale innovation, there has emerged a cadre of racketeers, distributed worldwide, who seek to exploit the open- access (OA) model for their own financial gain. These unscrupulous publishers abuse the authorpays model of open access publishing only for their own profit, engaging in dishonest, deceptive, and unethical practices, and mocking the goodwill of those who promote scholarly, open- access publishing. This article identifies and examines unethical practices in scholarly, open- access publishing, limiting its focus to those publishers employing the gold "author- pays" model.Etiology of the Unethical PracticesOne of the sources of the current problem is the common belief or assumption that all open- access publishing is meritorious, benevolent, and wellintentioned, a belief promoted by librarians and others backing the open- access movement. Many academic librarians blindly and comprehensively promote scholarly, open- access publishing, which means they are partially promoting publishers committing unethical practices.The nature of gold open- access publishing means that those who promote the model must qualify their recommendations. In the traditional scholarly publication model, the market served to prevent or eliminate publishers that engaged in unethical practices; that market control is non- existent in the openaccess model, especially given the minimal startup barriers and low operating costs of open- access publishing. For example, no library would pay for a journal known to be bogus, but bogus journals that are free are unbounded by the startup cost barrier. And because predatory publishers are masters of deception, it is easy for them to fool submitting authors into thinking they are legitimate. Moreover, in the online environment it is especially easy for an unethical publisher to appear legitimate. Also, the very nature of the author- pays model is a conflict of interest; the more articles a gold OA publisher accepts, the more money it earns.Reading a bibliography, vita, or list of published works, it is hard to identify journals from unethical publishers. The titles they use mimic those of legitimate journals and begin with phrases such as "International Journal of...." This sideby- side placement of both legitimate and illegitimate journals is a loss, for no longer can one assume that an unfamiliar but legitimate sounding journal is in fact legitimate; further investigation is required, creating new burdens for those engaged in the evaluation of scholarly activities or in judging research grant applications.Other StudiesThe problem of fraudulent open- access publishers is a relatively new one, and few authors have covered it. The review journal The Charleston Advisor has published several of this writer's reviews of these publishers. In 2009, it pub - lished this writer's review of Bentham Open (Beall, 2009). In 2010, the journal published a collective review of nine publishers, and it is in this review that this author coined the term "predatory open- access publishers." "We use the term 'predatory' cautiously, primarily in an attempt to initially categorize a certain class of Open- Access, scholarly publishers with like characteristics" (Beall, 2010a, pp. 14-15). A later update to this article examined three additional publishers this author identified as predatory (Beall, 2010b). Writing in 2011, this author reviewed the Texas- based publisher Internet Scientific Publications (Beall, 2011).The 2010 version of the International Mathematical Union's Best Current Practices for Journals (2011) alludes to predatory publishers, saying, "The proliferation of poorly run mathematical journals is becoming an increasing burden to the community. …