[visionlist] [cvnet] Beall's List

[Lester Loschky]

Hi Alex,

As usual, you make some excellent cogent points.  Beall also makes some
excellent points.  However, Beall fails to acknowledge the simple economics
of the fact that real production costs of academic electronic publishing
are primarily borne by academics, not the publishers.  Academics produce
the content, do peer review of the content, and edit the content for free
(or for very little for the Editors).  Publishers provide the editing
software, copy-edit the finished product, and host it on the web. All of
this goes back to your excellent point that academic publishers can have up
to 30% profit margins.  This goes back to our earlier discussion over the
last few years of the incredibly over-priced Gold Open Access charges.

Your support of Beall's argument in favor of a) pre-print servers, combined
with b) "overlay journals" that collect the best pre-prints is an
interesting proposal.  Economically, it makes excellent sense as a path
away from Gold Open Access to Peer-reviewed Green Open Access.

To date, I have not posted my non-peer-reviewed work on pre-print servers
because I have felt that it is an end-run around the peer-review system.
On the other hand, posting to an unreviewed web archive is certainly no
worse, definitely more honest, and absolutely cheaper than "publishing" in
a predatory journal with virtually no review.  And having the peer-review
of such archived articles done by an "overlay journal" that selects the
best pre-prints from such archives, and requires revisions as necessary,
would bring peer-review back into the system.

Best wishes,

Les

On Sat, Apr 21, 2018 at 6:41 AM, Alex Holcombe <aoholcombe at gmail.com> wrote:

> While Beall makes some very questionable claims – especially
> characterizations regarding open access journals – that perhaps stem from
> an ideological lens, I nevertheless agree with his conclusion that the
> community needs to develop preprint servers (mostly PsyArxiv.org and
> Biorxiv.org in our fields) and low-cost journals such as overlay journals.
> For me a major motivation for the preprint servers, and one not mentioned
> by Beall, is to contribute to an open scholarly infrastructure where much
> new research can be found and which reduces the premium that publishers
> (via subscription fees or article processing charges) can charge. For
> decades it was thought that university-based repositories would serve this
> role, but the field-specific preprint servers have become more popular with
> researchers.
>
> Perhaps in part as a result of the rise of preprint posting
> <http://asapbio.org/preprint-info/biology-preprints-over-time>, we
> recently have seen researchers in Germany, Finland, and France step up en
> masse (e.g., https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/
> french-researchers-pledge-go-without-springer-journals) to support or egg
> on library and university negotiators in their position that they should
> not be paying so much (yielding profit margins of over 30% for the large
> corporate publishers) for subscriptions. This type of action helps
> organizations (e.g. psyoa.org) have a better chance when applying for
> funding for low-cost journals and also makes funders more comfortable in
> continuing to ramp up their requirements for open access. Unfortunately
> however, some funders such as those in the UK have set up systems that
> result in researchers simply making individual articles in subscription
> journals open access, which doesn't really contribute to changing the
> system (more on this point here: https://www.
> timeshighereducation.com/blog/open-access-germany-best-deal-no-deal);
> posting to preprint servers does do this. Perception researchers are
> posting preprints - see some here: https://www.biorxiv.org/
> search/perception.
>
> Alex
>
> --
> Alex Holcombe | Professor
> School of Psychology | Faculty of Science
> The University of Sydney
> Web <http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/staff/alexh/lab/>, Twitter
> <https://twitter.com/ceptional>, Map
> <http://openwetware.org/wiki/Holcombe:Location>
>
>
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-- 
Lester Loschky
Professor
Associate Director, Cognitive and Neurobiological Approaches to Plasticity
Center
Department of Psychological Sciences
471 Bluemont Hall
1114 Mid-Campus Dr North
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS  66506-5302
email: loschky at ksu.edu
research page: https://www.k-state.edu/psych/research/loschkylester.html
lab page: http://www.k-state.edu/psych/vcl/index.html
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