Open Access Week (October 21-27)

Workshops: Digital Commons and SelectedWorks Room 1300, Henderson Library Monday, October 21 from 9-10 a.m. Wednesday, October 23 from 1-2 p.m. Thursday, October 24 from 3-4 p.m. Friday, October 25 from 9-10 a.m. Zach S. Henderson library is offering two new services: Digital Commons and SelectedWorks. Digital Commons@Georgia Southern is an open access repository that contains research, scholarship, and creative works of our faculty, staff and students. SelectedWorks consists of individual sites for faculty and staff that highlight their research and publications. In this workshop, you will learn about the benefits of these services and how to use them as well as the basics of open access and copyright. Presenters: Ashley D. Lowery, Digital Collections Specialist at GSU; Debra Skinner, Coordinator of Cataloging and Metadata at GSU Affordable Learning Georgia Library Conference Room Wednesday, October 23 from 9-10 a.m. Thursday, October 24 from 9-10 a.m. In this workshop, you will learn about Affordable Learning Georgia (ALF). Affordable Learning Georgia is: -A University System of Georgia (USG) initiative to promote student success by providing affordable textbook alternatives-A one-stop service to help USG faculty and staff identify lower-cost, electronic, free, and Open Educational Resources, building on the cost-effective subscription resources provided by GALILEO and the USG libraries-A California State University-MERLOT partner benefit service Presenter: Bede Mitchell, Dean of the Library at GSU Webinars: Scholarly Open Access Publishing and the Peril of Predatory Publishers Room 1300, Henderson Library Tuesday, October 22 from 12-1:30 p.m. Emerging scholarly publishing models are changing the culture of scholarly communication. One of these new models, gold open access, provides free, universal access to scholarly literature. However, this model, financed by article processing charges paid for by authors or their funders, has led to the publication of questionable research. Numerous unscrupulous or “predatory” publishers using the gold open-access model have appeared, accepting papers just to earn the author fees. Greater scrutiny is required by all involved in scholarly communication from authors, to reviewers, editors, and even tenure and promotion committees. This talk will tell the story of the emergence of questionable publishers and explain how scholars and academic librarians can identify them. A particular journal’s inclusion in a library database doesn’t always mean it is legitimate. This webinar will provide an overview of the issues related to scholarly open-access publishing of importance to academic librarians, focusing on the unintended consequences such as predatory publishers and their abuse of the gold open-access model. Presenter: Jeffrey Beall from the University of Colorado Denver Developing and Implementing Open Access Policies Room 1300, Henderson Library Tuesday, October 22 from 2-3:30 p.m. Gather a group on your campus and participate together as two experienced practitioners describe the elements of an effective OA policy, explain why each is important and detail the process for moving a policy forward on your campus. After a basic overview, join in a highly interactive opportunity to pose your questions to the speakers about the development and implementation of open access policies. We welcome participation from those who are both new to the process and issues as well as those already deeply in the policy development or implementation stages. Learning Outcomes: -Learn how to evaluate elements of policy;-Learn how to engage and assess stakeholders-Be able to identify the critical pieces for the implementation phase. Presenters: Ada Emmett, Scholarly Communications Librarian, University of Kansas; Suzanne Kriegsman, Program Manager, Office for Scholarly Communication, Harvard University Supporting and Showcasing Undergraduate Research through the Institutional Repository Room 1300, Henderson Library Thursday, October 24 from 2-3 p.m. A growing number of liberal arts college libraries are using their own institutional repositories to capture student works and foster student research. This webinar addresses the topics of: -Collecting and managing student works: undergraduate major papers, capstone and research projects-Campus based publishing: creating and publishing peer-reviewed student-run scholarly journals-Capturing and showcasing student events, student research conferences and workshops Presenter: Tim Tamminga, Berkeley Electronic Pres

Predatory Publishing

The ‘predatory publishing’ label is often linked to open access in order to discredit it, evoking as this concept does both vanity and self-publishing. Today, however, more and more critical attention is being paid to how this label has been and is still being constructed. On the one hand, the rise of unscrupulous OA publishers who charge author-facing fees and provide little to no editorial oversight is indicative of the increasing pressure placed on scholars to produce more and more research “outputs” and to increase the citability and indexing of such. Fuelled by various national incentive systems, it is a pressure that can lead to serious violations of traditional publishing ethics: by authors who self-publish or self-plagiarise in order to meet their targets, and by a certain breed of journals that seem more concerned with making a pro t than with disseminating academic knowledge, as shown in the essays in this pamphlet by Vaclav Stetka and by Luděk Brož, Tereza Stöckelová, and Filip Vostal, especially relative to the notorious case of Czech scholar Wadim Stielkowski, who at one point boasted of having published 17 monographs and 60 articles in just 3 years and who, even after departing Charles University, Prague under a hail of scandal, continues to teach and publish. Stielkowski’s “case,” as it were, for which one of the contributors to this volume, Vaclav Stetka, served as chief whistleblower, serves as a somewhat spectacular exemplum of what can happen when two malevolent forces converge: a dishonest scholar hellbent on maximizing their publications and citations and fraudulent, for-profit “fake journals.” On the other hand, do we need to be careful when it comes to accusing all those labelled as predatory publishers as being driven exclusively by profit? After all, much the same can be said about commercial publishers such as Elsevier who are perceived to be legitimate if not, indeed, prestigious

The Changing Nature of OA Journals: Helping Scholars Identify the Good, the Bad, and the Political

When the Open Access (OA) movement began at the beginning of the 21st century, librarians and select scholars saw it as a way to level the playing field by disseminating scholarly work freely, by easing the financial burden placed on rising subscription costs, and by offering alternatives to the traditional publishing model. Predatory and opportunistic OA publishers were quick to arrive on the scene, however, leaving faculty and researchers scrambling for a new and updated vetting process for selecting their publication targets. Jeffrey Beall’s blog and Beall’s List, along with other important publication directories, have become an important part of the effort to provide oversight and information to scholars about OA publishers. This paper will discuss OA controversies and review sources and opinions on the transformation of academic publishing efforts in the context of OA issues. Recent trends in librarianship demonstrate the need to educate authors on how to comprehensively research journals before submitting manuscripts to them, how to avoid predatory OA publishers, and where scholarly communication is going in terms of oversight and reputability of OA journals. This paper will briefly summarize many of the possible roles of the librarian, as well as discuss and evaluate the impact of Beall’s List on both the publishing world and librarianship

Global Awareness and Pandemic in Predatory Journals and Publishing: A Bibliometric Analysis

Open access publishing not only increases accessibility to library materials and publications but also provokes the growth of predatory journals. The objectives of this study were to 1) corroborate the increasing concern of predatory journals, 2) identify journals publishing articles that commented on this issue, and 3) pinpoint occupations, academic disciplines, and geographic locations of these authors. This bibliometric study covered 2010-2020 tracking the library and information science literatures on the subject of predatory journals and outlined the trends. Analytical results of this study showed that there was an increasing global awareness of predatory journals among academic librarians and the scholarly community. The findings suggest a critical need for establishing information literacy in academia in the context of predatory journals, prompting academic librarians and scholarly authors to collaboratively deal with the pandemic of predatory publications

Predatory Publishing: What You Don’t Know CAN Hurt You

Predatory publishers recruit faculty and graduate students to publish in their seemingly high quality journals that frequently lack peer review, charge fees, and have poor reputations. Tenure-track nursing faculty with publishing expectations may be especially vulnerable to the inviting emails received from predatory publishers. Nurse educators should collaborate with their health sciences librarians to identify and implement strategies to combat predatory publishers in nursing education and research

Predatory publishing practices: is there life after Beall's list?

Background. Scholarly communication is an ever-evolving practice. As publishing advanced from the printed format to digital formats, new trends, practices and platforms emerged in academia. As reputable publishers adapted their business models to accommodate open access, many non-reputable publishers have emerged with questionable business models and less-than favourable or unacceptable publishing services. Objectives. This paper discusses changing trends in scholarly publishing, the advent of and problems caused by pervasive predatory publishing practices, and possible solutions. The paper also investigates possible alternatives to Beall’s list and whether a “one-stop shop” black- or white list would serve as a comprehensive tool for scholarly authors. Results. The paper concludes that there is no “one-stop shop” or comprehensive resource or guidelines available at this stage for scholarly authors to consult before publishing. It alerts scholars to be cautious and to do research about potential publishers, before submitting manuscripts for publication. Contributions. It provides recommendations and some useful resources to assist authors before they publish their works.CW201

A New Publishing Landscape: The Curiosities, Opportunities, & Pitfalls of Open Access Publishing

Open access (OA) publishing is a unique model for disseminating academic work to a larger readership that is not controlled by traditional publishing/subscription gate-keepers. This panel provides an informative session reviewing OA as a new publishing landscape ripe with opportunities and potential pitfalls. To help you navigate this uncharted terrain, three presenters will guide you through a discussion covering OA\u27s origin story, models under which OA operates, pros and cons of the OA landscape, and differing perspectives on OA from a variety of academic stakeholders. The goal of the session is to educate participants about OA publishing and generate an open dialogue of the virtues and vices it offers academics. By the end of the session you will walk away with a mental map equipped to chart your own path into (or away from) OA territory

Open access: The whipping boy for problems in scholarly publishing

With this paper, we hope to foster debate about the place of open access (OA) in scholarly publishing. After providing a background to OA’s development and current state, we examine some of the accusations leveled against it: that OA publishers are predatory, that OA is too expensive, and that self-depositing papers in OA repositories will bring about the end of scholarly publishing. After contextualizing each accusation, we show that they arise from problems with not only access, open or otherwise, but also the scholarly publishing system more broadly. Accordingly, we instead propose the discussions we believe the scholarly community should be having about scholarly publishing to take advantage of social and technological innovations and move it into the 21st century.This is the final published version of the article. It was originally published in Communications of the Association for Information Systems (Kingsley, Danny A. and Kennan, Mary Anne (2015) "Open Access: The Whipping Boy for Problems in Scholarly Publishing," Communications of the Association for Information Systems: Vol. 37, Article 14. Available at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol37/iss1/14). The final version is available at http://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol37/iss1/1

Identifying publications in questionable journals in the context of performance-based research funding

In this article we discuss the five yearly screenings for publications in questionable journals which have been carried out in the context of the performance-based research funding model in Flanders, Belgium. The Flemish funding model expanded from 2010 onwards, with a comprehensive bibliographic database for research output in the social sciences and humanities. Along with an overview of the procedures followed during the screenings for articles in questionable journals submitted for inclusion in this database, we present a bibliographic analysis of the publications identified. First, we show how the yearly number of publications in questionable journals has evolved over the period 2003–2016. Second, we present a disciplinary classification of the identified journals. In the third part of the results section, three authorship characteristics are discussed: multi-authorship, the seniority–or experience level–of authors in general and of the first author in particular, and the relation of the disciplinary scope of the journal (cognitive classification) with the departmental affiliation of the authors (organizational classification). Our results regarding yearly rates of publications in questionable journals indicate that awareness of the risks of questionable journals does not lead to a turn away from open access in general. The number of publications in open access journals rises every year, while the number of publications in questionable journals decreases from 2012 onwards. We find further that both early career and more senior researchers publish in questionable journals. We show that the average proportion of senior authors contributing to publications in questionable journals is somewhat higher than that for publications in open access journals. In addition, this paper yields insight into the extent to which publications in questionable journals pose a threat to the public and political legitimacy of a performance-based research funding system of a western European region. We include concrete suggestions for those tasked with maintaining bibliographic databases and screening for publications in questionable journals

Anthropology and Open Access

While still largely ignored by many anthropologists, open access (OA) has been a confusing and volatile center around which a wide range of contentious debates and vexing leadership dilemmas orbit. Despite widespread misunderstandings and honest differences of perspective on how and why to move forward, OA frameworks for scholarly communication are now part of the publishing ecology in which all active anthropologists work. Cultural Anthropology is unambiguously a leading journal in the field. The move to transition it toward a gold OA model represents a milestone for the iterative transformation of how cultural anthropologists, along with diverse fellow travelers, communicate more ethically and sustainably with global and diverse publics. On the occasion of this significant shift, we build on the history of OA debates, position statements, and experiments taking place during the past decade to do three things. Using an interview format, we will offer a primer on OA practices in general and in cultural anthropology in particular. In doing so, we aim to highlight some of the special considerations that have animated arguments for OA in cultural anthropology and in neighboring fields built around ethnographic methods and representations. We then argue briefly for a critical anthropology of scholarly communication (including scholarly publishing), one that brings the kinds of engaged analysis for which Cultural Anthropology is particularly well known to bear on this vital aspect of knowledge production, circulation, and valuation. Our field’s distinctive knowledge of social, cultural, political, and economic phenomena should also—but often has not—inform our choices as both global actors and publishing scholars