Naslov
Predatory publishers : a treat to scholarly communication

Autori
Hebrang Grgić, Ivana

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, neobjavljeni rad, znanstveni

Skup
PubMet 2015 : scholarly publishing in the context of open science

Mjesto i datum
Zadar, Hrvatska, 24.09.2015. - 25.09.2015

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Domaća recenzija

Ključne riječi
open access; scholarly journals; article processing charges; peer-review; predatory publishers

Sažetak
Open Access (OA) movement has changed the way of scholarly publishing. Based on free, unrestricted online availability of scholarly communication, it has existed since early 1990s, although defined in 2002. It has storngly influented accessability and impact of scholarly communication in the last qarter-century. OA advantage is proved by many researchers, e.g. Harnad, Hajjem, Altman, Moed etc. OA can be achieved in two ways, through OA reopsitories and through OA journals. In the scope of this presentation are OA journals. At the beginnings, freely available scholarly journals were edited and published by enthusiasts who wanted to prove that publishing high quality scholarly information can be cheaper and faster in electronic environment. They worked for free and the first OA journals were completely freely available, with no costs, either for users (readers) or for producers (authors) of scholarly papers. Today, it is obvious that there are some costs in OA publishing that have to be covered. There are several cost models in OA publishing, but the most common is APC model (Artcle Processing Charges) where OA journals are freely available to everyone and the costs are covered by authors (or their institutions). Although maybe not in accordance with original idea of OA, APC model is not necessarily bad sollution, as long as the price is not too high and the papers are peer- reviewed. Since 1665 scholarly journals have existed to publish reliable and evaluated scholarly information. At the beginning of the 21st century new problem arises – new „scholarly“ publishers who want to make profit by publishing unreviewed, low quality information in OA, using APC model. Those publishers are called perdatory publishers and we can argue if they are, in fact, cyber criminals who want to trick scholars by promissing fast peer review, by using false names and addresses, unexisting members of editorial boards etc. Their web sites seem to be authentic and trustworthy, but in fact they are full of false data and their peer review process is manufactured. It is not always easy to distinguish between predatory publishers and reliable OA publishers who do charge APCs, but also control quality of papers they publish. Scholars are very often unaware of the existance of predatory publishers or are unable to decide if a publisher is predatory or not. There are several ways to cope with predatory publishers and the most important is education through lifelong learning for all the participants in scholarly communication – researchers, information specialists, editors, publishers, funding agencies and others. The most important part of such education should be information literacy (IL). IL skills are important for finding, evaluating and using information. Great help in identifying predatory publishers is Beall's list, as well as his criteria for determining predatory OA publishers and journals. Lately also hijacked journals and misleading metrics are added to the list. Before including a publisher on the list, complete analysis of its practices has to be done, according to ethical standards (proposed by international associations and committees such as Committee on Publication Ethics). Suspicious situations are, for example, if a journal title is simmilar to renomated journal title ; if unexisting scholars are listed as editorial boars members ; false metrics is used ; promotion is done by spam e-mails ; visual identities that can be misinterpreted are used ; the same editorial boards are listed for several journals ; number of board members is insufficient ; lack of transparency in publishing operations ; papers are already published in other journals ; publisher does not reveal its location ; author's guidelines are copied from other publishers etc. Number of predatory publishers is increasing constantly (from several publishers in 2011 to more than 600 in 2015). Those publishers are a great threat to global science – the future of science depends on their identification and exclusion from scholarly communication.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Informacijske i komunikacijske znanosti

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