Amen Mark---I couldn't agree with you more! Having spent the last 10 years of my life fighting for the rights of scholars from the Global South, I see a US-EU-built and dominated publishing system that stacks the deck against the rest of the world in terms of visibility, cost, language, technology, and more (and can also be myopic---as per your point and Toby's). And despite the existence of "other" routes to publishing (without judging the merit of these routes), the fact remains that the system's "preferred" routes---the ones that lead to the sandbox the US-EU research world plays in---are much less accessible to scholars from the Global South than from the Global North.
So ideally, we need to work harder to make sure that our publishing reforms aren't making equity in scholarly publishing even worse than now. In fact, ideally, we should work directly on improving equity, first and foremost, as our primary goal for a more "open" world, as opposed to creating solutions like APCs that have arguably made equity worse.
And we should improve indexing and other infrastructure that researchers around the world can access (like high-speed processing). And we should improve journal standards (as many groups are working on). And so on.
But I think you and I both would stop short of giving a free pass to putting every journal that gets published on equal footing with the best journals in the world. We should work to make a world where the best journals are equally accessible to everyone (whatever that looks like---I'm not saying all journals need to look like Science). There are plenty of real, evidence-laden reasons to be concerned about the massive growth journals that publish anything for a fee---that's a different thread altogether. At the moment (as this infographic shows: https://osiglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/OSI-Infographic-2.0.pdf), most of the world's research gets published in (and indexed from) so-called "specialty" journals---about 75% of the total. Less than 1% get published in "prestige" journals. Regional journals publish about 12 percent, preprints about three percent, and "deceptive" journals about 10 percent. To the extent these last three categories of journals will continue to be used, it behooves us to work with these agencies to help ensure their products are high quality and high integrity. We want these outputs to do justice to the researchers who depend on them, and to reliably serve the needs of the research community.
Sorry about the TLDR! You got to bed late---I'm up way too early...:)
Cheers,
Glenn
-----Original Message-----
From: OpenCafe-l <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Mark Huskisson
Sent: Tuesday, February 6, 2024 2:14 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [OPENCAFE-L] Scholarly Publishing in Low- and Middle-income Countries (LMIC)
Thanks, Glenn.
It wasn't so much a comparison of apples and oranges that led me to stay up past my bedtime, but the way that publishing from LMICs is characterised in forums such as this in Europe and North America. The inculcation of negative or pejorative phrases for research output from LMICs such as "Not all of these low-cost journals are predatory, of course" feeds a hugely problematic narrative that we need to be extremely careful about.
I know you need more evidence, but to characterize a thriving ecosystem of scholarly communication and research output from the majority of the world because it is not visible via "the Scopus-dominated, WoS-dominated, pay to play world of modern scholarship" troubles me. As a starting point, it assumes that legitimacy is only achieved if journals appear in commercial indexes. Sentences such as "open journals that mirror quality subscription journals" add to the implication that quality is primarily achieved via mirroring the quality that can only achieved by participating in the publishing industry that relies upon subscriptions and APCs.
I don't argue with the statement that "APCs may be a barrier to OA publication by researchers from low-income countries", but it again frames the output on the terms applied by the Global North and its publishing industry. The argument back in 2014 was that the legitimacy of research publishing is only available through the self-regulated and professionalised brands of publishing houses in North America and Europe – and to participate required an ability to pay and if you couldn't pay then there was philanthropic help available from the generous donors in the north. And continuing to perpetuate that narrative a decade on troubles me.
By only accepting a universe that is defined by a legitimacy that is bestowed upon journals indexed in Scopus/WoS we ignore the vast (far larger) publishing ecosystem that has grown over the last decade outside of the view of our commercial systems in the North. Better indexing is definitely needed and Dimensions seems to have accelerated beyond WoS/Scopus in this regard (I think Dimensions now indexes over 60% of those 46k journals previously mentioned). The current commercial indexes which define this universe of acceptability limit the visibility of scholarship not in English, written in right-to-left text, by researchers where there is no access to APC funds (or knowledge of or willingness to rely upon philanthropy), and where the capacity to publish does not rely on the generosity of the 'publishing industry' in the Global North. It is self-built and sustainable (and we can discuss separately why the growth of Diamond OA has been so successful outside of the print-legacy publishing industry elsewhere in the Open Café).
Our goals are similar I think and I'm happy to agree to disagree on the details. We appear to be coming to the subject from different directions so exploring these views and giving them oxygen in the public square is helpful. But I do take umbrage at the assumption that quality and legitimacy of published research are tied to the industry metrics of the North and until researchers in the South play by the rules of the publishing industry (inherently predicated on an ability to pay [or receive charity]) they will remain 'invisible' or get bundled into characterisations such as "Not all of these low-cost journals are predatory ... actually preferred the "deceptive" label ... weren't necessarily bad actors.".
My suggestion would be to recalibrate our lens to see better and not dismiss the enormous wealth of global research taking place sustainably and at scale around the world outside of our own frame of reference and cessing to define legitimacy and quality based upon the commercial metrics of the publishing industry.
Mark
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