- Email: [email protected]
Factors affecting global flow of scientific knowledge in environmental sciences
Journal Pre-proofs Factors affecting global flow of scientific knowledge in environmental sciences Christian Sonne, Rune Dietz, Aage K.O. Alstrup PII: DOI: Reference:
S0048-9697(19)35004-1 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.135012 STOTEN 135012
To appear in:
Science of the Total Environment
Received Date: Revised Date: Accepted Date:
23 August 2019 14 October 2019 15 October 2019
Please cite this article as: C. Sonne, R. Dietz, A.K.O. Alstrup, Factors affecting global flow of scientific knowledge in environmental sciences, Science of the Total Environment (2019), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.scitotenv.2019.135012
This is a PDF file of an article that has undergone enhancements after acceptance, such as the addition of a cover page and metadata, and formatting for readability, but it is not yet the definitive version of record. This version will undergo additional copyediting, typesetting and review before it is published in its final form, but we are providing this version to give early visibility of the article. Please note that, during the production process, errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Factors affecting global flow of scientific knowledge in environmental sciences
Christian Sonne1,*, Rune Dietz1, Aage K. O. Alstrup2 1Aarhus
University, Department of Bioscience, Arctic Research Centre (ARC), Frederiksborgvej
399, PO Box 358, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark 2
Aarhus University, Department of Nuclear Medicine and PET Center, Palle Juul-Jensens
Boulevard 99, DK-8200 Aarhus, Denmark
* Corresponding author. Professor Christian Sonne, DScVetMed, PhD, DVM, Dipl. ECZM (Wildlife Health), Aarhus University, Faculty of Science and Technology, Department of Bioscience, Frederiksborgvej 399, PO Box 358, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark. Tel. +45-30-78-3172; Fax: +45-87-15-50-15; Email: [email protected].
Abstract Here we present our view on the current Open Access debate, predatory journals and the on-going publication and promotion strategy of some countries and research institutions. We urge the world's researchers, journals and grant holders in collaboration to carefully consider how best to ensure continuous high-quality scientific publications in the future in a way so that limited funding results in important data and information being unpublished.
Keywords: Plan S; Open access; Knowledge; Publication.
Linking environmental science with societal responses There is an increasing need to link knowledge on environmental issues with societal responses to obtain better sustainability and good environmental status. In a study carried out by Cornell et al. (2013) that authors point out that it takes a new integrative approach to merge scientific knowledge
1
on environmental issues with sustainable development and solutions. This require that social science, research, peer review and other important factors be merged into more open knowledge flows and systems. Here we shed light on some of the important factors that may affect the global knowledge flow of environmental science from north to south and thereby have an impact on sustainable development (Collyer 2018).
Open Access and Plan S Recently, several publications have discussed Science Europe’s Plan S Open Access (OA) and how it may affect the way scientists publish and thereby how knowledge is distributed globally (Enserink 2018; Schiermeier 2018; Spedding et al. 2019). This debate was further heated up since Welcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington proclaimed same intention as Plan S (Noorden 2018). This debate is important to us as researchers, as our efforts are most often directly evaluated on the basis of the quality and quantity of scientific publications, and here it will, for example, be problematic if we have important data, but cannot pay to have them published or forced to publish in low ranked journals. After all, our research is worthless if it is not communicated internationally to colleagues and communities. While OA is honorable and increase journal’s readership worldwide, opposite of paywalled publication, through free access for readers making scientific results more widespread, it is also associated with significant risks, which threatens to overshadow the benefits (Else 2018). First, the OA fee of 500-3000 USD per article reduce the communication of scientific knowledge from poor communities. In many such countries it is more than what a professor gets in monthly salary and the OA system have a dramatically impact on their CV and thus internationally professional opportunities (Jaschik 2012). China, on the other hand, prioritize scientific publication and continue to push out an ever-increasing number of scientific papers and is now on their way to control global knowledge flow despite it has also lead to multiple mediocre papers (Tollefson 2018; de Vrieze 2018). This way there could be a risk that it is the economy, rather than the quality of the results,
2
that determine whether the results are published or not. Secondly, the yearly global costs for publishing the 2.5 mill OA papers of 1-8 billion USD is steadily on the rise with the growing number of published papers (Landhuis 2016). Therefore, a productive research group with e.g. 30 papers will be hit economically hard by expenses up to 15,000-90,000 USD annually just for OA fees, which is a large amount in scientific budgets - also in developed countries (Jennions et al. 2018). The consequence may be layoffs by research staff, a reduction in research activity, or that valuable data remaining in researchers' drawers instead of being made public. One must also bear in mind that the journals and their publishers needs to be financially sustainable and that is indeed an increasing challenge linked to OA versus paywalled publishing. Elsevier, that publish more than 20 % of all scientific papers “….. remain ready and willing to collaborate with all stakeholders and to embrace open access…..” (Hersh 2017). We call for this kind of dialogue on OA between scientific journals, funding agencies, governments and universities. This is necessary to avoid researchers from being economically limited in their ability to publish their results and to prevent the scientific knowledge landscape from being distorted (Jennions et al. 2018). We urge that the fee problem should be taken care of by for example national OA Foundations so already stretched research budgets are not exposed to further pressure. We also point out that scientific journals have an increasing responsibility for a balanced global flow of scientific information where some communities are not left behind. At the end, publishing under subscription may still be a good alternative to OA but despite a deal recently negotiated in Germany on this topic it’s still with many challenges (Kupferschmidt 2019). In its current form, both Science, Nature and PNAS journals cannot commit to Plan S (McNutt 2019).
Predatory journals Another topical factor that is counteracting both global distortion and influence by open access is the predatory journals (OAPJ) (Bayry 2018; Priyadarshini 2018). These journals benefit from the
3
authors willingness to pay for publishing their papers or from the fact that funding resources such as EUs H2020 programs require or are willing to pay the OA fee. As long as the true scientific journals were free to publish in, it was less attractive to publish in OAPJ, but the situation is quite different now. It is now possible for dubious publishers to do a business out of the researchers' need to publish. The number of OAPJ that hire in fake editors and publish either fake or non-peerreviewed papers for an average fee is increasing by an enormous speed (Bohannon 2013; Shen et al. 2015; Sorokowski et al. 2017). Today, the real number of OAPJ is largely unknown with incomplete lists containing only ca. 1360 journals such as the Bealls’ list (Butler 2013), which was recently shut down as a result of threats (Chawla 2018). Five of the larger OAPJ has tripled their number of published papers from 2013 to be around 175,000 in total involving around 400,000 scientist (Bayry 2018). Recently, this led to the OMICS International publishing group to pay $50 million in damages for their predatory tactics (Brainard 2019; Chawla 2018; Priyadarshini 2019). The increase in OAPJ is problematic for two reasons: First, it affect research and university budgets, and secondly it continuous to pollute the international scientific literature with questionable scientific evidence, which could harm for example human medicine and health if trusted and therefore action should be taken at university or governmental levels (Priyadarshini 2018). Furthermore, the journals merely increase the public’s distrust of science. To show how OAPJ operates we analysed the number of e-mails received by Sonne and Alstrup (authoring this article) from OAPJ over a period of two weeks. The total number was 225 of which 130 were from medical journals, 14 from odontology or veterinary magazines and 81 were within biology or other sciences. Most homepages were questionable, and stated OA fees of on average 1358 USD ranging from 99 to 3019 USD. This fee is significantly higher than the 178 USD reported by Shen et al. (2015). Thirty-eight of the journals had articles indexed in PubMed Central. Two of these were in Journal of Obesity and Overweight (Annex Publishers) listed by Beall as an OAPJ (Beall 2012, 2019). The papers look flawed despite funded by NIH (National Institutes of Health) and show that PubMed and NIH fail in their funding and journal index policy as they
4
clearly support OAPJ activities which is now deemed illegal by the US federal judge (Bayry 2018; NCBI 2018). India is continuously striking back against these predatory journals through for example national boards updating for example lists of respectable journals (Patwardhan 2019). To keep up the good work India need backup from the international scientific society and established journals to get in control of the problem. Unfortunately, this is not the case as described in the above section with for example the internationally recognized PubMed Central. These papers are funded by NIH and is a direct undermining of India’s long-term fight against predatory journals. Therefore, the subversive business of predatory journals continuous to assault young and inexperienced scientists with fake promises and insane fees and that have to stop. One way is to have worldwide federal judges set examples like the one in the US where the OMICS International publishing group had to pay $50 million in damages for their predatory tactics (Brainard 2019). Aside from PubMed, NIH and other agencies changing their policy, university senior researchers could teach how to avoid predatory journals and publish sound papers. Without such measures, predatory journals will continue to pollute the global scientific literature with fraud and erroneous results adversely affecting science as well as for example patient safety.
Publish and promotion Recently, the direct relationship between publication and profit in South Africa was debated (Hedding 2019) and it came up that it is barely an efficient way of attracting and retaining researchers (Hastie 2019). As editors and editorial board members for several journals, we see that it is part of a larger complex, where quantity seems more important than quality. This is problematic, as it undermines the whole idea of academic publishing and over flood scientific journals and literature by flawed papers that sometimes contain false and fraud data or even data taken directly from the internet. In addition, multiple unjustified corresponding authors is increasing because it in some countries lead to direct promotion, which is not sound either (Zuo 2018).
5
Plagiarism In addition, plagiarism and self-plagiarism is an increasing problem. Fortunately, IT systems offer plagiarism checks and these are vital when editors handle scientific manuscripts submitted for peerreview and publication. We therefore encourage all journals to use plagiarism systems together with a check of the author’s publication history when evaluating new submissions. The way publications and promotion is working may even benefit Open Access predatory journals, which is the last we need as editors and authors (Priyadarshini 2018).
Finding reviewers In addition to all these challenges, it is getting increasingly hard to find suitable high-quality reviewers for scientific submissions across most journals, which is also our own experience (Sonne and Alstrup 2018). This mean that the entire publishing industry and global knowledge production through peer-reviewed scientific journals is under siege and should be carefully monitored by all societies across academia and academia publishing. We therefore urge the world's researchers, journals and grant holders in collaboration to carefully consider how best to ensure continuous highquality scientific publications in the future in a way so that lack of funding does not mean that important data will not be published. In addition, there is a dilemma for researcher in both doing the fund raising, research and publishing papers while on the other hand also being asked to pay OA fee often not economically supported by the university management. That is an additional argument for trying to solve the question of increasing fees in OA journals.
References Bayry J. 2018. Indian researchers must resist predatory open-access journals. Nature 563:35. Beall J. 2012. Predatory publishers are corrupting open access. Nature 489:179. Beall J. 2019. HTML: https://beallslist.weebly.com/.
6
Bohannon J. 2013. Who's Afraid of Peer Review? Science 342:60-65. Brainard J. 2019. U.S. judge rules deceptive publisher should pay $50 million in damages. HTML: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/us-judge-rules-deceptive-publisher-should-pay501-million-damages. Butler D. 2013. Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing. Nature 495:433-435. Chawla DS. 2018. The undercover academic keeping tabs on ‘predatory’ publishing. Nature 555:422-423. Collyer FM. 2018. Global patterns in the publishing of academic knowledge: Global North, global South. Curr Sociol 66:56-73. Cornell S, Berkhout F, Tuinstra W, Tàbara JD, Jäger J, Chabay I, de Wit B, , Langlaish J, Mills D, Moll P, Otto IM, Petersen A, Pohl C, van Kerkhoff L. 2013. Opening up knowledge systems for better responses to global environmental change. Environ Sci Pol 28:60-70 Vrieze J. 2018. Open access journal editors resign after alleged pressure to publish mediocre papers. HTML: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/open-access-editors-resign-after-allegedpressure-publish-mediocre-papers. doi:10.1126/science.aav3129. Else H. 2018. Radical open-access plan could spell end to journal subscriptions. Nature 561:17-18. Enserink M. 2018. European funders seek to end reign of paywalled journals. Science 361:957-958. Hastie W. 2019. South Africa: stop personal profit from publication payouts. Nature 566:182. Hedding DW. 2019. Payouts push professors towards predatory journals. Nature 565:267. Hersh
G.
2017.
Working
towards
a
transition
to
open
access.
HTML:
https://www.elsevier.com/connect/working-towards-a-transition-to-open-access. Jaschik
S.
2012.
Faculty
Pay,
Around
the
World.
HTML:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/03/22/new-study-analyzes-how-faculty-paycompares-worldwide. Jennions M, Lanfear R, Nakagawa S. 2018. Plan S will hit some academic societies hard. Nature 564:39.
7
Kupferschmidt K. 2019. Deal reveals what scientists in Germany are paying for open access. HTML: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/deal-reveals-what-scientists-germany-arepaying-open-access. Landhuis E. 2016. Scientific literature: Information overload. Nature 535:457-458. McNutt M. 2019. Opinion: "Plan S" falls short for society publishers-and for the researchers they serve. Proc Natl Acad Sci 116:2400-2403. NCBI. 2018. HTML: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/. Noorden RV. 2018. Wellcome and Gates join bold European open-access plan. HTML: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07300-5. Patwardhan B. 2019. Why India is striking back against predatory journals. Nature 571:7. Priyadarshini S. 2018. India targets universities in predatory-journal crackdown. Nature 560:537538. Schiermeier Q. 2018. China backs bold plan to tear down journal paywalls. Nature 564:171-172. Shen C, Björk BC. 2015. Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics. BMC Medicine 13:230. Sonne C, Alstrup AKO. 2018. Peer-review under siege. Sci Total Environ 651:1180-1181. Sorokowski P, Kulczycki E, Sorokowska A, Pisanski K. 2017. Predatory journals recruit fake editor. Nature 543:481-483. Spedding M, Barrett J, Morgan ET, Vore M, Geraghty D, Kirkpatrick C, Cascorbi I. 2018. Plan S: A threat to quality of science? Science 363:462. Tollefson J. 2018. China declared world's largest producer of scientific articles. Nature 553:390. Zuo
M.
2018.
HTML:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/most-chinese-scientists-write-academic-
144738386.html?guccounter=1.
8
Highlight
We debate how Open Access may affect knowledge flow
Publish and promotion may lead to fraud data
Poor countries may be left behind due to lack of funding
9
The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.
10
S0048-9697(19)35004-1 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.135012 STOTEN 135012
To appear in:
Science of the Total Environment
Received Date: Revised Date: Accepted Date:
23 August 2019 14 October 2019 15 October 2019
Please cite this article as: C. Sonne, R. Dietz, A.K.O. Alstrup, Factors affecting global flow of scientific knowledge in environmental sciences, Science of the Total Environment (2019), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.scitotenv.2019.135012
This is a PDF file of an article that has undergone enhancements after acceptance, such as the addition of a cover page and metadata, and formatting for readability, but it is not yet the definitive version of record. This version will undergo additional copyediting, typesetting and review before it is published in its final form, but we are providing this version to give early visibility of the article. Please note that, during the production process, errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Factors affecting global flow of scientific knowledge in environmental sciences
Christian Sonne1,*, Rune Dietz1, Aage K. O. Alstrup2 1Aarhus
University, Department of Bioscience, Arctic Research Centre (ARC), Frederiksborgvej
399, PO Box 358, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark 2
Aarhus University, Department of Nuclear Medicine and PET Center, Palle Juul-Jensens
Boulevard 99, DK-8200 Aarhus, Denmark
* Corresponding author. Professor Christian Sonne, DScVetMed, PhD, DVM, Dipl. ECZM (Wildlife Health), Aarhus University, Faculty of Science and Technology, Department of Bioscience, Frederiksborgvej 399, PO Box 358, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark. Tel. +45-30-78-3172; Fax: +45-87-15-50-15; Email: [email protected].
Abstract Here we present our view on the current Open Access debate, predatory journals and the on-going publication and promotion strategy of some countries and research institutions. We urge the world's researchers, journals and grant holders in collaboration to carefully consider how best to ensure continuous high-quality scientific publications in the future in a way so that limited funding results in important data and information being unpublished.
Keywords: Plan S; Open access; Knowledge; Publication.
Linking environmental science with societal responses There is an increasing need to link knowledge on environmental issues with societal responses to obtain better sustainability and good environmental status. In a study carried out by Cornell et al. (2013) that authors point out that it takes a new integrative approach to merge scientific knowledge
1
on environmental issues with sustainable development and solutions. This require that social science, research, peer review and other important factors be merged into more open knowledge flows and systems. Here we shed light on some of the important factors that may affect the global knowledge flow of environmental science from north to south and thereby have an impact on sustainable development (Collyer 2018).
Open Access and Plan S Recently, several publications have discussed Science Europe’s Plan S Open Access (OA) and how it may affect the way scientists publish and thereby how knowledge is distributed globally (Enserink 2018; Schiermeier 2018; Spedding et al. 2019). This debate was further heated up since Welcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington proclaimed same intention as Plan S (Noorden 2018). This debate is important to us as researchers, as our efforts are most often directly evaluated on the basis of the quality and quantity of scientific publications, and here it will, for example, be problematic if we have important data, but cannot pay to have them published or forced to publish in low ranked journals. After all, our research is worthless if it is not communicated internationally to colleagues and communities. While OA is honorable and increase journal’s readership worldwide, opposite of paywalled publication, through free access for readers making scientific results more widespread, it is also associated with significant risks, which threatens to overshadow the benefits (Else 2018). First, the OA fee of 500-3000 USD per article reduce the communication of scientific knowledge from poor communities. In many such countries it is more than what a professor gets in monthly salary and the OA system have a dramatically impact on their CV and thus internationally professional opportunities (Jaschik 2012). China, on the other hand, prioritize scientific publication and continue to push out an ever-increasing number of scientific papers and is now on their way to control global knowledge flow despite it has also lead to multiple mediocre papers (Tollefson 2018; de Vrieze 2018). This way there could be a risk that it is the economy, rather than the quality of the results,
2
that determine whether the results are published or not. Secondly, the yearly global costs for publishing the 2.5 mill OA papers of 1-8 billion USD is steadily on the rise with the growing number of published papers (Landhuis 2016). Therefore, a productive research group with e.g. 30 papers will be hit economically hard by expenses up to 15,000-90,000 USD annually just for OA fees, which is a large amount in scientific budgets - also in developed countries (Jennions et al. 2018). The consequence may be layoffs by research staff, a reduction in research activity, or that valuable data remaining in researchers' drawers instead of being made public. One must also bear in mind that the journals and their publishers needs to be financially sustainable and that is indeed an increasing challenge linked to OA versus paywalled publishing. Elsevier, that publish more than 20 % of all scientific papers “….. remain ready and willing to collaborate with all stakeholders and to embrace open access…..” (Hersh 2017). We call for this kind of dialogue on OA between scientific journals, funding agencies, governments and universities. This is necessary to avoid researchers from being economically limited in their ability to publish their results and to prevent the scientific knowledge landscape from being distorted (Jennions et al. 2018). We urge that the fee problem should be taken care of by for example national OA Foundations so already stretched research budgets are not exposed to further pressure. We also point out that scientific journals have an increasing responsibility for a balanced global flow of scientific information where some communities are not left behind. At the end, publishing under subscription may still be a good alternative to OA but despite a deal recently negotiated in Germany on this topic it’s still with many challenges (Kupferschmidt 2019). In its current form, both Science, Nature and PNAS journals cannot commit to Plan S (McNutt 2019).
Predatory journals Another topical factor that is counteracting both global distortion and influence by open access is the predatory journals (OAPJ) (Bayry 2018; Priyadarshini 2018). These journals benefit from the
3
authors willingness to pay for publishing their papers or from the fact that funding resources such as EUs H2020 programs require or are willing to pay the OA fee. As long as the true scientific journals were free to publish in, it was less attractive to publish in OAPJ, but the situation is quite different now. It is now possible for dubious publishers to do a business out of the researchers' need to publish. The number of OAPJ that hire in fake editors and publish either fake or non-peerreviewed papers for an average fee is increasing by an enormous speed (Bohannon 2013; Shen et al. 2015; Sorokowski et al. 2017). Today, the real number of OAPJ is largely unknown with incomplete lists containing only ca. 1360 journals such as the Bealls’ list (Butler 2013), which was recently shut down as a result of threats (Chawla 2018). Five of the larger OAPJ has tripled their number of published papers from 2013 to be around 175,000 in total involving around 400,000 scientist (Bayry 2018). Recently, this led to the OMICS International publishing group to pay $50 million in damages for their predatory tactics (Brainard 2019; Chawla 2018; Priyadarshini 2019). The increase in OAPJ is problematic for two reasons: First, it affect research and university budgets, and secondly it continuous to pollute the international scientific literature with questionable scientific evidence, which could harm for example human medicine and health if trusted and therefore action should be taken at university or governmental levels (Priyadarshini 2018). Furthermore, the journals merely increase the public’s distrust of science. To show how OAPJ operates we analysed the number of e-mails received by Sonne and Alstrup (authoring this article) from OAPJ over a period of two weeks. The total number was 225 of which 130 were from medical journals, 14 from odontology or veterinary magazines and 81 were within biology or other sciences. Most homepages were questionable, and stated OA fees of on average 1358 USD ranging from 99 to 3019 USD. This fee is significantly higher than the 178 USD reported by Shen et al. (2015). Thirty-eight of the journals had articles indexed in PubMed Central. Two of these were in Journal of Obesity and Overweight (Annex Publishers) listed by Beall as an OAPJ (Beall 2012, 2019). The papers look flawed despite funded by NIH (National Institutes of Health) and show that PubMed and NIH fail in their funding and journal index policy as they
4
clearly support OAPJ activities which is now deemed illegal by the US federal judge (Bayry 2018; NCBI 2018). India is continuously striking back against these predatory journals through for example national boards updating for example lists of respectable journals (Patwardhan 2019). To keep up the good work India need backup from the international scientific society and established journals to get in control of the problem. Unfortunately, this is not the case as described in the above section with for example the internationally recognized PubMed Central. These papers are funded by NIH and is a direct undermining of India’s long-term fight against predatory journals. Therefore, the subversive business of predatory journals continuous to assault young and inexperienced scientists with fake promises and insane fees and that have to stop. One way is to have worldwide federal judges set examples like the one in the US where the OMICS International publishing group had to pay $50 million in damages for their predatory tactics (Brainard 2019). Aside from PubMed, NIH and other agencies changing their policy, university senior researchers could teach how to avoid predatory journals and publish sound papers. Without such measures, predatory journals will continue to pollute the global scientific literature with fraud and erroneous results adversely affecting science as well as for example patient safety.
Publish and promotion Recently, the direct relationship between publication and profit in South Africa was debated (Hedding 2019) and it came up that it is barely an efficient way of attracting and retaining researchers (Hastie 2019). As editors and editorial board members for several journals, we see that it is part of a larger complex, where quantity seems more important than quality. This is problematic, as it undermines the whole idea of academic publishing and over flood scientific journals and literature by flawed papers that sometimes contain false and fraud data or even data taken directly from the internet. In addition, multiple unjustified corresponding authors is increasing because it in some countries lead to direct promotion, which is not sound either (Zuo 2018).
5
Plagiarism In addition, plagiarism and self-plagiarism is an increasing problem. Fortunately, IT systems offer plagiarism checks and these are vital when editors handle scientific manuscripts submitted for peerreview and publication. We therefore encourage all journals to use plagiarism systems together with a check of the author’s publication history when evaluating new submissions. The way publications and promotion is working may even benefit Open Access predatory journals, which is the last we need as editors and authors (Priyadarshini 2018).
Finding reviewers In addition to all these challenges, it is getting increasingly hard to find suitable high-quality reviewers for scientific submissions across most journals, which is also our own experience (Sonne and Alstrup 2018). This mean that the entire publishing industry and global knowledge production through peer-reviewed scientific journals is under siege and should be carefully monitored by all societies across academia and academia publishing. We therefore urge the world's researchers, journals and grant holders in collaboration to carefully consider how best to ensure continuous highquality scientific publications in the future in a way so that lack of funding does not mean that important data will not be published. In addition, there is a dilemma for researcher in both doing the fund raising, research and publishing papers while on the other hand also being asked to pay OA fee often not economically supported by the university management. That is an additional argument for trying to solve the question of increasing fees in OA journals.
References Bayry J. 2018. Indian researchers must resist predatory open-access journals. Nature 563:35. Beall J. 2012. Predatory publishers are corrupting open access. Nature 489:179. Beall J. 2019. HTML: https://beallslist.weebly.com/.
6
Bohannon J. 2013. Who's Afraid of Peer Review? Science 342:60-65. Brainard J. 2019. U.S. judge rules deceptive publisher should pay $50 million in damages. HTML: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/us-judge-rules-deceptive-publisher-should-pay501-million-damages. Butler D. 2013. Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing. Nature 495:433-435. Chawla DS. 2018. The undercover academic keeping tabs on ‘predatory’ publishing. Nature 555:422-423. Collyer FM. 2018. Global patterns in the publishing of academic knowledge: Global North, global South. Curr Sociol 66:56-73. Cornell S, Berkhout F, Tuinstra W, Tàbara JD, Jäger J, Chabay I, de Wit B, , Langlaish J, Mills D, Moll P, Otto IM, Petersen A, Pohl C, van Kerkhoff L. 2013. Opening up knowledge systems for better responses to global environmental change. Environ Sci Pol 28:60-70 Vrieze J. 2018. Open access journal editors resign after alleged pressure to publish mediocre papers. HTML: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/open-access-editors-resign-after-allegedpressure-publish-mediocre-papers. doi:10.1126/science.aav3129. Else H. 2018. Radical open-access plan could spell end to journal subscriptions. Nature 561:17-18. Enserink M. 2018. European funders seek to end reign of paywalled journals. Science 361:957-958. Hastie W. 2019. South Africa: stop personal profit from publication payouts. Nature 566:182. Hedding DW. 2019. Payouts push professors towards predatory journals. Nature 565:267. Hersh
G.
2017.
Working
towards
a
transition
to
open
access.
HTML:
https://www.elsevier.com/connect/working-towards-a-transition-to-open-access. Jaschik
S.
2012.
Faculty
Pay,
Around
the
World.
HTML:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/03/22/new-study-analyzes-how-faculty-paycompares-worldwide. Jennions M, Lanfear R, Nakagawa S. 2018. Plan S will hit some academic societies hard. Nature 564:39.
7
Kupferschmidt K. 2019. Deal reveals what scientists in Germany are paying for open access. HTML: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/deal-reveals-what-scientists-germany-arepaying-open-access. Landhuis E. 2016. Scientific literature: Information overload. Nature 535:457-458. McNutt M. 2019. Opinion: "Plan S" falls short for society publishers-and for the researchers they serve. Proc Natl Acad Sci 116:2400-2403. NCBI. 2018. HTML: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/. Noorden RV. 2018. Wellcome and Gates join bold European open-access plan. HTML: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07300-5. Patwardhan B. 2019. Why India is striking back against predatory journals. Nature 571:7. Priyadarshini S. 2018. India targets universities in predatory-journal crackdown. Nature 560:537538. Schiermeier Q. 2018. China backs bold plan to tear down journal paywalls. Nature 564:171-172. Shen C, Björk BC. 2015. Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics. BMC Medicine 13:230. Sonne C, Alstrup AKO. 2018. Peer-review under siege. Sci Total Environ 651:1180-1181. Sorokowski P, Kulczycki E, Sorokowska A, Pisanski K. 2017. Predatory journals recruit fake editor. Nature 543:481-483. Spedding M, Barrett J, Morgan ET, Vore M, Geraghty D, Kirkpatrick C, Cascorbi I. 2018. Plan S: A threat to quality of science? Science 363:462. Tollefson J. 2018. China declared world's largest producer of scientific articles. Nature 553:390. Zuo
M.
2018.
HTML:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/most-chinese-scientists-write-academic-
144738386.html?guccounter=1.
8
Highlight
We debate how Open Access may affect knowledge flow
Publish and promotion may lead to fraud data
Poor countries may be left behind due to lack of funding
9
The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.
10