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Don’t Take My Word for It

I know, I know, I’m always yakking about how CUNY needs an institutional repository to help faculty and others make their scholarly and creative works open access.  But it’s not just me, and it’s not just about CUNY — here’s a broader, bolder statement from Peter Suber (Harvard) and the Darius Cuplinskas (Open Society Foundations):

Every institution of higher learning should ensure that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles by its faculty members are made open-access through a designated repository that captures the institution’s intellectual output.

“Every institution of higher learning.”

Read more at Open Access to Scientific Research Can Save Lives.  (And yes, the article does give a fantastic concrete example of how open access can save lives.)

Of course, “Open access saves lives” is the flip side of “Closed access means people die.”

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Of CUNY, By CUNY, For CUNY

I have presented “Of CUNY, By CUNY, For CUNY: Why We Need an Institutional Repository” (or a variation on the theme) several times, to several hundred members of the CUNY community.  (I’ve even linked to it several times already on this blog, but a good message is worth repeating…)

If you haven’t seen me in action yet, you can get a good sense of my message by reading through the slides:

If you can put these slides to good use on your campus, please do so!

Also, here’s an accompanying handout — please feel free share this, too!

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Predatory Open Access Publishers

The 2013 list of predatory open access publishers and journals has been released. This year’s list includes over 200 predatory open access publishing operations and over 100 predatory standalone journals.  Last year’s list named only 23 predatory publishers — clearly, there are more and more people out there who don’t really care about high-quality research and just see dollar signs when they learn about the gold open access publishing model. Unfortunately, these shady journals put the reputation of open access more generally at risk.

What, more specifically, are predatory open access publishers?

They are OA publishers whose mission is profit, not dissemination of scholarly information.  It’s not that they publish peer-reviewed scholarship and happen to have fees to cover expenses (a common and perfectly respectable open access model) — no, it’s that they charge fees to make a profit and happen to publish some articles, many of questionable quality, often without any peer review. One of their hallmarks is spamming people with calls for papers and flattering invitations to write or serve as editors — I’ve received many emails like this, and you probably have too.

Don’t fall prey to predatory open access publishers! (And don’t forget that there are predatory and low-quality toll access journals as well!)  Always research a journal’s quality before submitting an article to it!

(For more information, see “‘Predatory’ Open-Access Scholarly Publishers” by predatory-publisher watchdog (and keeper of the list) Jeffrey Beall.)