An interesting post to the LIBLICENSE email list:

From: David Prosser <david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk

Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 21:01:53 +0100

Interestingly, we heard today at a conference in Brussels on the PEER project that the project found:

1. No evidence of any harm to publishers as a result of embargoed green OA

2. Evidence of increased total usage through green OA

3. Evidence that green OA through the PEER project actually drives usage at the publisher site.

The PEER project did not investigate issues around gold OA and so I am a little surprised that this is the focus of the press release from STM.

David 

On 29 May 2012, at 19:52, LIBLICENSE wrote:

From: Kim Beadle <beadle@stm-assoc.org

Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 16:59:25 +0200

PEER End of Project Conference

29 May 2012. Brussels

STM welcomes support for gold open access from PEER conference

‘Gold’ open access publication is the practical route to achieving sustainable open access, the project partners agreed today at the PEER End of Project results conference in Brussels. The Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project, which will report to the European Commission in July 2012, provides large-scale, robust research to inform the debate about access to publicly funded research.

The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) welcomes the consensus of the partners, and hails PEER as a successful collaboration.

Behavioural, economics and usage research were presented at the conference today. “The PEER project shows that self-archiving is complex, inefficient and cannot be successfully achieved without the co-operation of publishers,” said Michael Mabe, CEO of STM.  Only 170 of the c 11,800 authors invited to self-archive, chose to do so. Usage research supports the hypothesis that readers prefer the publishers’ final version over self-archived manuscripts.

“Through working together on PEER, publishers, funders and the repository community have established greater trust and understanding,” said Mabe. “Today has demonstrated that there are a number of fundamentals on which all PEER partners are agreed, based on the results and experience of the project. Most strikingly, all partners are in agreement that ‘gold’ open access publication provides a practical, viable way to provide public access to research findings.”

PEER, supported by the EC eContentplus programme, is a collaboration between publishers, repositories, and the research community. The project was a partnership between STM, Fondation Européenne de la Science Association (ESF), Göttingen State and University Library (UGOE), Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V. (MPG), Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA).

The project, which has run since September 2008, has been investigating the effects of the large scale, systematic depositing of authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts on reader access, author visibility, and journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology of European research, with the aim of informing the evolution of policies in this area.

  -ENDS –

STM is an international association of over 100 scientific, technical, medical and scholarly publishers, collectively responsible for more than 60% of the global annual output of research articles, 55% of the active research journals and the publication of tens of thousands of print and electronic books, reference works and databases. We are the only international trade association equally representing all types of STM publishers – large and small companies, not for profit organizations, learned societies, traditional, primary, secondary publishers and new entrants to global publishing. www.stm-assoc.org

Contact Kim Beadle for more information – beadle@stm-assoc.org

An interesting article by Joseph Esposito on the Scholarly Kitchen website:

News reached me today on Twitter that Peter Binfield, Publisher of PLoS ONE, is leaving PLoS to found a new company, Peerj.com.

Peerj will be an open access publishing company with a radical new premise: publishing in a scholarly journal can cost a heck of a lot less than the extortionate fees charged by PLoS. If you go to the Web site, you will see, among other things, this statement:

If we can set a goal to sequence the human genome for $100, then why can’t we do the same for academic publishing?

Of course, setting a goal and achieving a goal are not one and the same, but you get the idea.

So now we see the Achilles Heel of the author-pays business model for open access laid bare, and every shrewd archer of the OA movement will be pointing an arrow at it. Whether or not toll-access publishing is too expensive is one thing, something we can argue about; but author-pays OA is definitely too expensive. After all, an author-pays service is essentially a hosting service with a PR department and some Web 2.0 tools. I think they’re great, but let’s not pretend that they are something more than this.

I mentioned that I became aware of Binfield’s move on Twitter because it says something about the kind of company that Peerj plans to be. Peerj will play in the pool, deep or shallow, of the social Web. Among its plans are to raise money on Kickstarter, a new source of start-up financing. This will be a company that pushes the metaphor of information technology as far as it can, automating whatever can be automated, and much more besides. This means there will be a small number of talented software developers and not much more (but don’t forget the evangelist for social media). That means a low cost basis, an essential part of the strategy to drive down costs. Low costs translate into lower author fees. We have seen this strategy before. (See Wal-Mart.)

So the OA price wars have begun. What will this mean to the new eLife, the OA ventures of Wiley and Sage, and so many others? And let’s not forget the massively overpriced PLoS ONE itself. At some point, even Peerj’s proposition of lifetime publishing services for $100 may come to seem expensive.

Read the original article and further comments here.

At the Open Publishing Seminar back in February I touched on the issue of predatory publishers.  One of the lists I’m on has recently had a thread on PPs some content of which may be of interest to those wanting to identify PPs or assess OA publishers.  The full posts are here: http://liblicense.crl.edu

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long piece on ‘predatory OA journals’, with a focus on the work of Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver, who tracks open-access publishers that operate on an author-pays model.

http://chronicle.com/article/Predatory-Online-Journals/131047/?key=HD10d1VhNHdJbCsyZTgRMj4EOyFoZk0hYn9JPS8pbl9cEQ%3D%3D

His blog  http://metadata.posterous.com/?tag=predatoryopenaccessjournals and web site http://scholarlyoa.com/ include summaries about apparently unethical publishers.

This does need to be treated with some caution as Mr Beall’s lists are drawn up by him based on patterns of behaviour, although there are criteria that Mr Beall uses to raise suspicions about particular publishers.  Ina Smith from Stellenbosch University, South Africa reported to the list that they have started to compile some criteria against which they measure the validity of an OA journal.  I thought this worth sharing:

The Stellenbosch criteria are:

1. Mandatory

• The journal must have a proper web page and URL with the following info e.g. Contact details, Editorial Team, Editorial Board, Advisory Board, Scope and Focus, Peer Review Process (must be an exhaustive peer review process), Publication Frequency, Open Access Policy, Author Guidelines, About the Publisher, Previously published issues (Archive) , Copyright policy (under the Creative Commons Licensing policies
• International editorial board
• Valid online ISSN registered with the ISSN International Centre (France)
• Members of CrossRef with doi’s assigned to individual articles
• Journal must have established a history of responsible reporting (not always possible with “new” OA journals)
• The journal must contain good quality articles detailing well performed research

2. Recommended

• Listed on DOAJ (not all OA journals are listed on DOAJ immediately, and there might be a slight time delay)
• (Howard’s note: some publishers and their journals considered predatory by Mr Beall (e.g. Internet Scientific Publications) are listed on DOAJ)
• Publisher must be registered with OASPA
• OA Policy of publisher must be available via SHERPA/RoMEO
• Listed on Wikipedia as an academic journal
• Digital preservation policy in place
• Journal title must be listed with one of the following:

– International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS)

– Science Citation Index

– Social Sciences Citation Index

– Arts and Humanities Citation Index

• Journal impact factor assigned to the journal – Journal Citation Reports – ISI (for impact factors)
• Journal ranking is recommended – SCImago Journal Ranking (Scopus)

If researchers are considering publishing in an unfamiliar OA journal that follows the author pays model the Liaison Librarians would be happy to assist with an assessment of the Journal.