The European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA) has issued a statement on the occasion of International Open Access Week 2023 calling on its member academies and the wider research community to curb predatory practices in the scientific publishing landscape. The paper identifies the causes of the rise of such practices and their negative impact on the scholarly publishing system. At the same time, ALLEA gives instructions for action to counter this development.
Negative side effect of gold open access
Although the development of open access publishing is generally positive, ALLEA criticises that the gold open access model can create inequalities for researchers in different disciplines, career stages and geographical regions. Other unintended consequences are the restriction of authors' autonomy with regard to the place of publication, the increasing monetisation of the academic research enterprise and the mass emergence of predatory journals whose editorial and publication standards do not conform to those of the research community. Especially in the case of predatory publishing, ALLEA sees the danger that this undermines the integrity of research, becomes further entrenched in the general research culture and leads to the waste of financial and human resources.
Educate authors, reform research assessment criteria
ALLEA sees two main reasons why authors publish in predatory journals:
- researchers' ignorance of the criteria for distinguishing between reputable and predatory journals, and
- deliberate publication in a predatory journal in the hope of furthering their own career.
To counter this, ALLEA calls on its academies to firstly introduce and promote available resources, tools and services to help researchers select quality journals. In addition, ALLEA recommends that research funding agencies, research and other higher education institutions stop using funds to pay Article Processing Charges (APC) to OA journals that use predatory practices. Second, ALLEA recommends that academies implement and advocate for reforms to research assessment practices in line with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA). For example, assessments would be based on the content of publications, rather than on journal-based metrics.
Strengthening non-profit publication models
ALLEA sees the progressive commercialisation of the academic publishing culture as a further reason for the strengthening of predatory practices. Academia, learned societies and institutions in Europe are therefore urged in the statement to strongly support non-profit publishing policies and to contribute resources to the development of alternative, non-profit open platforms for scholarly publishing, such as those operated by Open Research Europe, Wellcome Open Research and HRB Open Research.
- To access the ALLEA Statement on Curbing Predatory Publishing in Open Access Scholarly Publishing, please click on the following link: https://allea.org/portfolio-item/allea-statement-on-curbing-predatory-practices-in-open-access-scholarly-publishing/