Predatory Publishers are Spoiling Open Access

Jeffrey Beal. 10:15 - 10:45 am

Predatory publishers are hurting science communication and tarnishing the open access movement by unethically exploiting the gold open-access model for their own profit. The number of predatory publishers and predatory standalone journals is greatly increasing, as is author misconduct -- such as plagiarism -- which these publishers enable and facilitate. The presence of predatory publishers has many implications for academic librarians, who need to be more realistic and less idealistic about open access publishing. To better serve their patrons, librarians need to repurpose the concept of readers' advisory for the 21st century, bringing the skill of scholarly publishing literacy to their campuses.

SAGE Open: A case study of a for-profit publisher’s foray into Gold OA for the humanities and social sciences

Jim Gilden. 10:45 - 11:15 am

Author pays models of OA publishing have gained wide acceptance in STM, especially medicine. But social scientists and humanities scholars have different needs and understanding of OA publishing.

Launched in 2010, SAGE Open is a multidisciplinary peer reviewed Gold OA journal for social scientists and humanities scholars. Based on the PLOS One model, it has been by many measures a success. But it has also proved a challenge for editorial, marketing, publishing and back office operations. A look at some of what we’ve learned and are still learning.

Open Access and Its Enemies

J. Britt Holbrook. 11:15 - 11:45 am

I treat Open Access as a ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ – that is, as an attempt to enlist technology to co-produce a future for scholarly communication that we would like to see realized. But who are ‘we’ and what is the future ‘we’ envision? Speaking as someone engaged in scholarly communication, but also as someone whose scholarly communication is reflexive, I offer an account of who ‘we’ are and what it means for ‘us’ to communicate. I also offer an outline of who ‘they’ – the enemies of Open Access – are (HINT: they include some of us).

Keywords: Open Access; scholar; communication; publisher; libraries; policy; neoliberalism