Editorial
Open access publishing
Jean-François ROULET DDS , PhD , Prof hc , Professor
Editor-in-Chief
At least once a week I get an e-mail inviting me to become editor / reviewer or author of a scientific journal . They all are open access journals , which means that their content is available without restrictions or fees through the internet . This concept goes back to the Budapest Open Access Initiative ( 2002 ) 1 , which stated the following : ” its free availability on the public internet , permitting any users to read , download , copy , distribute , print , search , or link to the full texts of these articles , crawl them for indexing , pass them as data to software , or use them for any other lawful purpose , without financial , legal , or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself ” 1 . The basic idea behind is that knowledge should be publicly accessible and no barriers such as subscription fees should prevent the dissemination of knowledge . This is a very noble and idealistic thought which has been perverted by many mechanisms . A famous American economist has once stated “ There is nothing but a free meal !” This means that someone has to pay for it ! In the classical world the publisher pays for the production cost , which includes the peer review system , which is usually done for free by voluntary reviewers , who are usually managed by an academic who acts as Editor for a symbolic honorarium . The financial source for such an allowance is usually the subscription fee . The negative side is that big publishers offer to University libraries only packages , which usually include many Journals that the university does not want . Knowing this , one can say that in the traditional way the academic and the scientific institutions widely support the worldwide dissemination of knowledge . So it is understandable that Universities usually like the open access approach . However , the world is not just black and white . In the open access world there has been a reversal of financing practices . There the author must pay for the publication , which favors wealthy authors . The University of Florida ( UF ) has just launched an initiative to support UF members to publish in open access journals , which costs the UF 120 ’ 000 $/ year . It is substantially less than the cost of the traditional libraries . Furthermore , in the US grants traditionally pay for publication costs . But open access has also created “ predator journals ” where , with murky methods and shady or absent reviews , some publishers make fortunes on the back of the authors . Some of these Journals require submission fees , some ask for high publication fees , once the paper is accepted and some save by doing very sloppy reviews or none at all . The experiment of John Bohannon2 clearly shows how dangerous this route may be . John Bohannon decided to create a fake paper with such grave errors that a competent reviewer should easily detect and thus recommend its rejection : “ The Paper took this form : Molecule X from lichen species Y inhibits the growth of cancer cell Z . To substitute those variables I created a database of molecules , lichens , and cancer cell lines and wrote a computer program to generate hundreds of unique papers . Other than those differences , the scientific content of each paper is identical .” 1 He then created fictitious authors and institutions mainly in the developing world by permuting names and inventing institutions . To camouflage his good English , he had Google translate it into French and then back
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