I don’t know if the OA community has always welcomed and encouraged ‘internal 
critique’, but it has been a feature of the debates I’ve been involved in over 
the last 15 years (and others have much longer OA histories than I do!).  I 
don’t see the problem as being a lack of either internal critique or of voices 
denouncing dodgy practices.  For me, the problem has been the over-emphasis on 
‘predatory’ publishers - hardly a day goes by without mention of them - and the 
overblowing of a small (but real, of course) problem into something that has 
almost defined OA in many people’s minds.

David

On 9 Sep 2015, at 22:58, Heather Morrison 
<heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote:

Thank you for taking this on, Richard.

One thought is whether it would be in the best interests of OA to welcome and 
encourage internal critique. Perhaps if we were quicker to denounce predatory 
practices, we would have more credibility when we support true friends of OA 
(to me, this of necessity includes commitment to quality).

Just my two bits,

Heather Morrison

On Sep 9, 2015, at 6:05 AM, "Richard Poynder" 
<richard.poyn...@cantab.net<mailto:richard.poyn...@cantab.net>> wrote:

What many now refer to as predatory publishing first came to my attention 7 
years ago, when I interviewed a publisher who — I had been told — was 
bombarding researchers with invitations to submit papers to, and sit on the 
editorial boards of, the hundreds of new OA journals it was launching.

Since then I have undertaken a number of other such interviews, and with each 
interview the allegations have tended to become more worrying — e.g. that the 
publisher is levying article-processing charges but not actually sending papers 
out for review, that it is publishing junk science, that it is claiming to be a 
member of a publishing organisation when in reality it is not a member, that it 
is deliberately choosing journal titles that are the same, or very similar, to 
those of prestigious journals (or even directly cloning titles) in order to 
fool researchers into submitting papers to it etc. etc.

The number of predatory publishers continues to grow year by year, and yet far 
too little is still being done to address the issue.

Discussion of the problem invariably focuses on the publishers. But in order to 
practise their trade predatory publishers depend on the co-operation of 
researchers, not least because they have to persuade a sufficient number to sit 
on their editorial boards in order to have any credibility. Without an 
editorial board a journal will struggle to attract many submissions.

Is it time to approach the problem from a different direction?

More here: 
http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/predatory-publishing-modest-proposal.html

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