Hi all,
I plan to expand on this point in a later email, but I just want to note I already see some of the usual spots where people talk past each other in the OA discussion cropping up and one in particular is worth mentioning. In explaining part of the value of indexing services like WoS and Scopus to academic libraries and their institutions, Melissa commented that Scopus inclusion criteria align well with metrics the institution values for P&T and probably research impact KPIs as well. This is an overlooked issue that I have become increasingly sensitized to over the past year as I've worked with biology researchers on a paper concerning open access, APCs, and citation advantage. Most people working and producing scholarship/advocacy in the OA space do not sufficiently take into account the author point of view and fail to understand that their number one priority is to secure professional rewards for themselves through their publishing choices. Many of our dysfunctional incentives in the publishing landscape exist because of P&T processes and are not going anywhere until those change.
Best,
Ali Krzton
Research Data Management Librarian
Auburn University
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Thank you for allowing me to join this group. I didn't intend to comment yet, but Melissa's question about the criteria that Scopus and WoS use for indexing journals is important to follow up. In addition to quality criteria, Scopus and WoS require journals to publish at least English language titles and abstracts and be well cited by other journals in their database. A region with fewer indexed journals will have fewer citations to the region's non-indexed journals, a self-perpetuating cycle. On the other hand, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) indexes journals of all languages and uses objective measurable quality criteria, and no citation measure. When selecting an index to use, consider how citation measures (and all their flaws) and language can exclude otherwise high quality journals.
Margaret Winker
Margaret Winker, MD
Trustee, World Association of Medical Editors
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On Tue, Feb 6, 2024 at 8:51 AM Melissa Belvadi <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Mark, hi.
You question the practice of defining the legitimacy of a journal based on whether it is indexed in the most prestigious indexing services, but you fail to engage with the actual editorial practices of those indexes and whether their qualifications for inclusion are in fact discriminatory or entirely objective as to quality.
As a librarian serving a small university, I don't have time to investigate the editorial practices of every journal that one of our researchers might consider submission to.
We subscribe to Scopus, and when asked by graduate students or early career faculty about journals to consider, I advise them to look at the list of journals indexed there, as I know that the criteria Elsevier uses for inclusion line up quite well with the quality metrics our institution values when it comes time for tenure review and promotion.
All this hypothetical talk about being "inclusive" and "fair" to LMICs misses the reality of needs and incentives on the ground in the developed academic world.
More broadly, what I think I've observed over my 25+ year career as an academic librarian in two countries (the US and Canada), is that just when we start to solve one problem, the Left shifts the goal posts on us. The OA movement started, from my perspective, as a response to the out of control subscription prices for STEM journals in the 1990s+ and the lack of access to read that content among poorer institutions and countries. We collectively as an industry, academe + publishers, said, we need a more budget-sustainable pricing model. And everyone came up with OA to address that. Now that we're starting to see real progress, some people are now saying, hey wait, we can read it fine, but now we can't afford to publish in it too!
Frankly, what it looks like to me is that some people just want everything to somehow be totally free, free to read and free to publish, but don't seem to have good scalable answers as to who is going to actually pay for it all - someone has to pay for all of the work involved.
It sounds like what is being slipped in the back door is the demand that the higher income countries' taxpayers should subsidize not only the reading access but also the publication opportunities for researchers in the LMICs. If you want to make that case, go ahead, and I might even support it, but let's be really honest that that's what is being talked about.
And if we're going to foot the bill, we should have some say in the standards of research quality that we're paying for. And yes, that might mean demanding that they meet the standards of Scopus/WoS.
I await with an open mind a response that explains to me why my viewpoint is wrong from an economic viewpoint and/or knowledge progress one. We may have to agree to disagree on vague "fairness" principles. I'm not interested in paying for someone else's idea of fairness.
Melissa Belvadi
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Subject: Re: [OPENCAFE-L] Scholarly Publishing in Low- and Middle-income Countries (LMIC)
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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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