Dirty Secrets Revealed

Journal publishing and marketing, impact factors and access to

scholarship.Margy MacMillan, Kalen Gibb, Richard Hayman, Francine May, Madelaine Vanderwerff

Mount Royal University Library12 May 2014

How much control do we let large commercial publishers have over our scholarship, and academic careers?

As librarians, we may be able to add some different perspectives….

Why we’re here.... A number of issues have caused us to question:

Dirty Secret 1 - Economics

Company (2013) Net income Profit Margin Sales/Revenue/Turnover

Wiley $144,000,000 8.19% $1, 761, 000, 000

Springer $262,000,000 7.04% $3,721,000,000

Elsevier $895,000,000 9.48% $9, 443, 000,000Thomson Reuters $175,000,000 10.2% $12, 702,000,000

Chart data from Bloomberg, 2014

Research Libraries UK – Position paper on Journal Price Increases

“Prices in the software and communication industries are projected to fall”

“Increases …should not exceed 1% per year”

Typically we see increases around 6- 7% per year

Dirty Secret 2 - Rights

“this is a stark reminder to authors just who owns their research outputs...

It’s the publishers like Elsevier who own their research outputs.”

HOW MANY TIMES do you want to pay for an article?

Dirty Secret 3 – Lobbying

Dirty Secret 4 - Consequences

Problems for scholars with no access to these journals

Vicious circle disadvantages scholars in global South, other areas in publishing

Homogeneity of research – high impact journals prefer high impact authors, less room for newer scholars

Delays in publishing through serial submission – inhibits use of information

Dirty Secret 5 – The Trouble with Impact Factors

JIF’s were meant to be a journal selection tool, not a scholarship measurement tool

Citation ManipulationCitation Manipulation

Coercion. At some point during the peer-review process, editors (or anyone else involved in the process) request that authors add citations from their own journal (or a journal from the same publisher).

Editorials. Editors write editorials in which a disproportionate number of articles from their own journal are cited.

Reviewers . Reviewers suggesting citations of their own work. Reviewers may suggest that authors cite their articles.

6672 researchers in economics, sociology, psychology and business 20% report being coerced

“Editors are more likely to coerce assistant and associate professors than professors”

“commercial, for-profit companies show significantly greater use of coercive tactics than university presses. … it seems to be the more highly ranked journals that coerce”

“you cite Leukemia [once in 42 references]. Consequently, we kindly ask you to add references of articles published in Leukemia to your present article”

“The results show that in most cases Journal Impact Factors and their yearly variations do not display a strong correlation with citedness.”

Retain Control and Extend the Reach of Your Scholarship

• Know your rights! Check your copyright contracts carefully, negotiate

• Know your responsibilities – open access requirements

• Shameless self-promotion (BUT not self-citing)

• Make sure you can deposit in an institutional repository

•Publish in open access journals

Some Myths About Open Access

• Open access journals are less rigorous

• Open access journals have lower research

• Open access is free

• Open access means losing control of your scholarship

“Our results indicate that OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges.”

Myth 1: Open Access journals are less rigorous/of lower quality

“This comparison of the impact of OA and non-OA articles from the same journal in the first 4–16 months after publication shows that OA articles are cited earlier and are, on average, cited more often than non-OA articles.”

“Hence the OA Advantage is real, independent and causal. It is indeed true that the size of the advantage is correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are correlated with quality…. On a playing field leveled by OA, users can selectively access, use and cite those articles that they judge to be of the highest relevance and quality, no longer constrained by their accessibility.”

Myth 2: Open Access journals have lower research impact

“...a total conversion [to OA]will be slow in coming, because scientists still have every economic incentive to submit their papers to high-prestige subscription journals. The subscriptions tend to be paid for by campus libraries, and few individual scientists see the costs directly. From their perspective, publication is effectively free.

Myth 3: Open Access research is free

Open access – “you should think free as in free speech, not free as in free

beer”

~Richard Stallman

Normal research costs still apply:• Salary• Grants• Infrastructure & overhead• Distribution

Based in the perception that making your research freely available means that you give up your rights

In fact, typical Open Access author agreements leave you with more control over your IP than traditional pubs allow

“… the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

Myth 4: Open access means losing control of your scholarship

What do you think?

Some questions

• How much control should we let commercial publishers have over our scholarship, and academic careers? Why? Does it matter?

• What if you could only access the top 5 JIF journals in your discipline?

• What if you could only use/cite Open Access info?• What are JIFs good for?• Would you ever publish in an open access

journal? What are the barriers?

Points from participant discussion

•Concern around integrity of closed/open access journal – long publication cycle can impact timely fields, reduce research integrity •How measure real impact of research – do we know if it actually gets USED?•Need to educate others•How do you secure your rights - SPARC amendment - modify your rights•Improper to evaluate scholarship based on JIFs•Fees for open access publishing from some publishers may be a barrier•Will open access somehow become commercialized, go to dark side?•Norm around publishing in high impact entrenched – just happy to be published•Definite need to look at fine print•Barriers to change – rigid structure in TPC – passed on to students when we send them off to look in high impact journals•Speed/delays in publishing•Competitive market – how competitive is open access – lobbying etc.•OA has to be true competition•How can we change things? – needs to be a slow seedy shift preparing the soil, etc.•How do I know whether a particular journal is a good channel to reach my intended audience? Is there a checklist I can use to assess a journal? •Funding/resources to pay author fees to make articles OA -- one member chose not to make her article OA because she didn't have the ridiculous fee•Concern that some fields of study are quite small and narrowly focused, so journals in that field will never be on a list of top impact factor journals•Some participants commented that they had experience being asked by editors to include citations to a particular journal in their manuscripts