Voting with your feet: choosing which publishers deserve your time

Picture from above of black shoes and bottom of black pants standing on black asphalt, with two white arrows painted on the asphalt just above the feet, one arrow pointing diagonally up and the other pointing diagonally down
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Written by guest contributor Jessica Lange

Academic publishing relies on the voluntary participation of scholars to contribute as peer reviewers and editors. Editors typically look after reviewing initial submissions to a journal, finding peer reviewers, and reviewing the final submission for acceptance. Peer reviewers serve an equally important role, assessing a scholarly work for its validity, impact, and relevance to the field.  

Researchers choose to serve as editors and peer reviewers to contribute back to the scholarly community and advance research. This is also considered part of the “job” of an academic for the purposes of tenure and promotion. However, as precarious academic positions are on the rise, this underlying principle is being reconsidered. Even for academics with a full-time position, the squeeze of increasing administrative responsibilities alongside a heavier valuing of research in tenure and promotion, has led some to make strategic choices about where to devote their energies.  

Despite the importance of these roles to the scientific community, many people outside academia are surprised to learn that neither peer reviewers nor editors receive compensation for their work. Given that large, commercial publishers post hefty profit margins and may have questionable privacy practices, researchers are starting to wonder if these corporations should benefit from their voluntary labour and scholarly expertise.  

If the above applies to you, I’d recommend the KU Leuven framework based on the Fair Open Access Alliance. When evaluating a publication for editorial or peer review duties, ask if : 

“The supplier of the infrastructure for scholarly communication has a transparent ownership structure, and is not profit-driven and accountable to shareholders, but mission-driven and accountable to the academic community (e.g. an editorial board or scholarly society).” (Fair Open Access) 

This framework privileges “scholar-led” operations, those run and led by academics themselves, supported in many cases by universities, societies, libraries, or associations. For example, the McGill Library hosted journal Seismica, a free-to-authors and readers open access journal, launched in specific response to the for-profit nature of scientific publishing in their discipline.  

How can I assess a journal?  

Journals will typically post this kind of information in their “About” page. Review their website to see if they are published by a commercial publisher (e.g., Wiley, Elsevier etc.), a non-profit (e.g., Cambridge University Press, University of Toronto Press etc.), or independently supported by a university, library, or association. Does the journal provide a mission statement? What is the publisher’s mission and goals? If the journal charges article processing charges, are they transparent about the fees (if applicable)? 

What else would you add for consideration?  

Additional resources

Jessica Lange is the Scholarly Communications Librarian at McGill University. In this role, she provides services to the campus community in the areas of open access, publishing, author rights, and open educational resources (OERs). She also manages McGill’s open access repository eScholarship and its scholarly publishing program. Her research interests include scholarly publishing and open access.  

McGill professors and librarians involved in open access initiatives

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Open Access at McGill does not just happen during Open Access Week. It is alive and well the whole year round, and takes many different forms. In the past year, McGill librarians endorsed an Open Access Statement for McGill University Library, committing ourselves to open access scholarship. With the new statement, members of the McGill Library Council strive to make their publications freely available in various ways such as depositing a version of their publications in eScholarship, publishing in open access journals, advocating for open scholarship and encouraging other McGill researchers to make their research openly available. You can read more about the statement here and view McGill librarians’ publications in eScholarship here.

One way Open Access is manifesting itself in the departments I serve as liaison librarian is through the development of overlay journals in Mechanical Engineering. Overlay journals are a type of open access publication whereby experts in certain disciplines curate articles to present to their readers from open access repositories such as ArXiv, engrXiv, HAL, eScholarship and other sources, with the aim of promoting new models in scholarly publishing. Overlay journals provide the “best of” from among the many open access articles available today. Two McGill professors have been actively involved in starting up the “Journal of Theoretical, Computational and Applied Mechanics”, a new overlay journal in Mechanical Engineering. Professor Mathias Legrand serves on its Technical Board and Professor Jorge Angeles serves on its Scientific Advisory Board. The journal aims to “select publications of the highest scientific caliber in the form of either original papers or reviews” in the fields of mechanical engineering, applied mathematics, materials science, geophysics and more (https://jtcam.episciences.org/). Stay tuned for the first issue!

For more information about Open Access and what it means for your research, contact your liaison librarian!

Open Access: the time is now!

In the face of COVID-19, many publishers are opening up access to some of their content. ​However, studies show that this still only represents a small percentage of the world’s research.

Making your work open can have a number of advantages:
1)      Anyone can access your research, anywhere in the world

2)      Open access papers are cited more*

3)      You will fulfill funding-agency open access requirements ​

How do I make my work open?

Email escholarship.library@mcgill.ca with your list of publications/CV. We will check which of your publications can be made open and how (​yes, this includes articles that have already been published!). Read about one McGill researcher’s experience with making their work openvia eScholarship, McGill’s open access repository.

Have more questions about open access? 

Email your liaison librarian or escholarship.library@mcgill.ca

*See a list of studies up to 2015 about the open access citation advantage. See also this 2019 article.

McGill Library supports engrXiv!

I am pleased to announce that McGill Library recently became a member of engrXiv, an open access e-print repository in engineering where faculty can submit their publications. This repository is not-for-profit and relies on university libraries and other organizations to cover their expenses. Please click here for a list of other institutions supporting this important work. You can search engrXiv for freely accessible research in many fields of engineering. Wondering how to pronounce the name? Me too! Founders say to call it “engineering archive”. You’ll find out more details about its name here.

Like McGill’s own institutional repository, eScholarship, engrXiv is a recognized repository that provides faculty with a venue for publishing their author-accepted manuscripts so that they can comply with the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications requiring all grant-funded journal articles be made open access within 12 months of publication. If you are a faculty member or other researcher wishing to deposit to engrXiv, please go to: https://engrxiv.org/submit and follow the instructions. For more information about how engrXiv works, please click here.

engrXiv isn’t the only open access initiative that McGill Library supports. To learn about the others, please click here. Want to learn more about open access in general? Read all about it on the library’s pages or ask your librarian!

Download, create or share your own 3D models

The U.S National Institutes of Health has launched a 3D print exchange website that allows users to download, edit and share models of anatomy, bacteria and lab equipment. Among the current available selections: a frog dissection kit, the base of a cervical spine, a bust of a Macaque, the influenza virus, a microscope, a DNA playset and a “three-dimensional structure of the toxin-delivery particle antifeeding prophage of Serratia entomophila.” 

http://3dprint.nih.gov/

Potential, possible, or probable predatory publishers

There is a lot to keep in mind when deciding where to publish and it takes time to investigate individual journals and explore their websites. Not everyone considers the same things as important to them. For some it is about a journal’s prestige while for others it is about the audience that they can reach or about ensuring that their work is open access and available freely to all.

Unfortunately, there are publishers out there that are less than honest and provide false or misleading information about who they are and the impact that they have on a field. There are also publishers with hidden fees that send out invoices to authors after publishing their papers. These are commonly referred to as predatory publishers and they have fooled many a researcher.

One site that can help is Beall’s List of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publishers. Jeffrey Beall uses a set of criteria to create this list that makes a lot of sense. I urge you to take a close look at these publishers before deciding to send them your work.

DOAJ – Directory of Open Access Journals

doajYou probably have heard of the open access movement or open access journals. Do you know of a source that exclusively lists open access scholarly journals? The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is such a list, where you could search for peer-reviewed journal articles and browse them by subject. For example, Geography has 123 journal titles right now. Since this source is freely available, it may become one of your essential sources for academic content once you graduate.

Equal access to learning materials for STEM students across the globe

It’s not always easy to scratch together the money to buy an expensive textbook, and the Library does a lot to help ease the burden of those costs by buying and placing many textbooks on reserve and buying the electronic version when available. That said, it can be tough to get that reserve copy and sharing textbook costs with classmates is effective but not an all-out solution.

Autar Kaw, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of South Florida, is sensitive to the realities of how much learning materials cost. With grant money from the National Science Foundation (NSF), he has been able to turn his vision of equitable access for all into a reality. Kaw created a free, open courseware resource called Holistic Numerical Methods, promoting free access to math instruction. “Available to students across the globe, the jam-packed site offers video lectures, simulations, textbook chapters, PowerPoint presentations, multiple choice tests and worksheets to learn concepts in numerical methods (an approach that allows scientists and engineers to arrive at approximate solutions for mathematical models of problems they can’t solve exactly or that would take too long to solve).” Click here to read more about Autar Kaw, his open courseware initiatives, and his philosophies surrounding the integration of online resources with in-class instruction, along with some of the pitfalls of the ever popular Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

Photo Courtesy of Aimee Blodgett/USF

McGill Library’s Open Access Workshops

McGill Library is offering two fantastic workshops this month, in celebration of Open Access Week. Sure, the workshops are next week, but we’re flexible like that. Mark your calendars and join us for one or both of these informative sessions:

 

1. Open Access Sources: your key to accessing free and reliable research beyond the university gates
Workshop ● Monday, October 29th ● 12:00 -13:30 ● Redpath eClassroom

Are you wondering what will happen after you graduate and you no longer have access to your McGill subscriptions to online research materials? Come to this hands-on workshop and learn how to:

  • Access reliable research once you’ve graduated from McGill
  • Find and use a variety of Open Access resources that are available for free online

2. Connecting with reliable, open access health information on the Web
Workshop ● Tuesday, October 30th ● 15:00 – 16:30 ● Redpath eClassroom

Do you and your family members have questions about health and wellness? Come to this workshop and learn how to:

  • Find reliable and free online consumer health information to answer your health and wellness questions
  • Assess the information and determine if it will be useful to you, your friends and your family
  • Access a collection of  books, available at McGill, written specifically for consumers on health and wellness topics

To learn more about workshops offered by McGill Library, click here.