by: Keith Nockels
Academic Librarian
Academic Librarian
Many research funders require you to
publish the work they fund as an open access article (check SHERPA/JULIET to see if your funder
does). Open access articles are freely available to all readers,
with no need for a subscription or payment. This makes your work more
widely available, and may increase its citation count.
In the traditional publishing model,
the reader pays a subscription, or a fee to download an individual article. In the open access model, the reader pays nothing. To discuss how open access affects you as an
author, and whether you will need to pay a fee, contact us for advice.
There are many reputable open access publishers, and many reputable “traditional” publishers offer an open access option.
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| Created by Adrienne Yancey for opensource.com https://flic.kr/p/9LBN2U |
There are many reputable open access publishers, and many reputable “traditional” publishers offer an open access option.
But publishing has a bad side too. There are publishers who charge a fee, promise great things, and deliver
little. Some of them solicit articles by emailing people directly.
I sometimes get emails, inviting me
to write an article. Alarm bells ring if I am addressed wrongly
(Dear Dr Nockels,) or not at all (Dear, ). Some of the emails are badly
written or edited, and they often approach me for work in fields I am supposed
to be an expert in but about which I know nothing. Some are from
journals that cover a strange mix of subjects, like (fictional, probably) the “International
Journal of Nutrition and Lunar Studies”. I suspect that if any reputable journal wanted me to write an invited
article, it would approach me in a rather more personal way. Not
that this has ever happened, yet, anyway…
These emails are, I strongly suspect,
from “predatory” publishers. They may tell you their journal is widely
indexed, when it is not, or that it is indexed in something that actually
indexes everything. Sometimes the
editorial boards include people who are named without their
knowledge. Sometimes these journals ask you, the author, to suggest
reviewers for your article, and do little to check the identity of that
reviewer.
A BMJ Minerva column refers to a study reported in Nature, in which a Dr Anna O. Szust applied to a large number of “predatory”
journals asking to be an editor. 48 out of the 360 accepted her
and 4 of those made her editor in chief. Polish speakers among you
(sadly I am not one) will spot that oszust means “fraud”.
Some existing journals have been
“hijacked” by predatory publishers and some predatory journals have titles so
similar to the title of an existing, reputable journal, that you can be easily
fooled.
If you have
had such an email, or are worried about a journal that you are thinking of
submitting to, here are some actions you can take.
·
Ask
colleagues who have experience of being published and knowledge of which
journals are the core ones.
·
Ask the Library – we can identify core
journals, check the journal’s claims about where it is indexed and would be
happy to investigate a journal you are thinking of submitting to.
·
This (open
access) article by Hansoti, Langdorf and Murphy, in the Western Journal of
Emergency Medicine includes
criteria to help you distinguish legitimate from predatory open access
journals.
·
The Minerva
article mentioned above refers to an (open access) study in BMC Medicine, on how to tell the difference
between a predatory and a legitimate biomedical journal.
·
The
International Committee of Medical Journal Editors have published a news item about “Fake”, “Predatory” and “Pseudo” journals. It includes a definition of these
types of journal, and reasons why they pose a threat and should be avoided.
This is based on articles I wrote for the University Hospitals of Leicester Writing Club Blog, by kind permission of Pip Divall, Clinical Librarian Service Manager. If you work at University Hospitals of Leicester, do consider attending a Writing Club meeting. Meetings are workshops, led by librarians or health practitioners, looking at a specific topic of interest and relevance topeople writing for publication.