Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association

Last updated
Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association
AbbreviationOASPA
Formation14 October 2008
Type International professional association
HeadquartersOnline
Location
Membership
Scholarly open access publishers
Official language
English
Chair of Board
Jennifer Gibson
Website oaspa.org

The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include matters pertaining to open access books and open scholarly infrastructure. [1]

Contents

History

The OASPA was launched on October 14, 2008 at an "Open Access Day" celebration in London hosted by the Wellcome Trust. [2] The following organizations are founding members: [3]

The OASPA faced some criticism for a perceived conflict between its self-declared role as the "stamp of quality for open access publishing" and the application of its own criteria for membership. One member organization, Frontiers Media, was included on Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory open access publishing companies. [4] Two members, Hindawi and MDPI - initially called predatory by Beall - were later removed from his list after pressure was applied to his employer. [5] [6] There was also concern around the fact that OASPA had been founded by BioMed Central and other open access publishers, which would cause a conflict of interest in their "seal of approval". [7] OASPA has also been criticized for promoting gold open access in a way that may be at the expense of green open access. [8]

Activities

OASPA organizes an annual conference on open access scholarly publishing. [9]

OASPA encourages publishers to use Creative Commons licenses, particularly the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), [10] which is in line with most definitions of "open", e.g. the Open Definition by the Open Knowledge Foundation. [11]

Members

OASPA members fall into the following groups:

Professional publishing organisations – Organisations that include at least one full-time professional who manages the publication of OA scholarly journals or books. These organisations may be for-profit or nonprofit, and they may own journals or books or manage the publication on a contract basis for societies or other groups of scientists or scholars. Members of this class may also include organisations such as academic/research libraries, university presses, or other organisations in which the primary focus is other than publishing but still employ full-time professionals who manage the publication of OA scholarly journals and/or books.

Scholar publishers – Individuals or small groups of scientists/scholars that publish usually a single scholarly journal in their field of study. The publication process is often largely subsidised by volunteer effort.

Other organisations – Other organisations who provide significant services and/or support for OA publishing.

In order to join OASPA as a member organization, a publisher must undergo an assessment process and meet set criteria. These criteria were set in 2013 and revised again in August 2018. [12] There are seven categories of OASPA membership: [13]

As of March 2021, OASPA has 159 members. [14]

Members of OASPA that publish journals exclusively in OA comprise the Fully Open Access Publishers special interest group. [15]

Response to the Science sting

As a response to the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? investigation, OASPA formed a committee to investigate the circumstances that led to the acceptance of the fake paper by 3 of its members. [16] On 11 November 2013, OASPA terminated the membership of two publishers (Dove Medical Press and Hikari Ltd.) who accepted the fake paper. Sage Press, which also accepted a fake paper, was put "under review" for 6 months. [1] Sage announced in a statement that it was reviewing the journal that accepted the fake paper, but that it would not shut it down. [17] Sage's membership was reinstated at the end of the review period following changes to the journal's editorial processes. [18] Dove Medical Press were also reinstated in September 2015 after making a number of improvements to their editorial processes. [19]

See also

Related Research Articles

Medknow Publications also known as Wolters Kluwer Medknow or simply Medknow, is a publisher of academic journals on behalf of learned societies and associations. Previously an independent Indian publisher, Medknow is now part of within Wolters Kluwer's Health Division, and is part of Wolters Kluwer India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sage Publishing</span> Independent academic publishing company

Sage Publishing, formerly SAGE Publications, is an American independent academic publishing company, founded in 1965 in New York City by Sara Miller McCune and now based in the Newbury Park neighborhood of Thousand Oaks, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hindawi (publisher)</span> Scientific and medical journal publisher

Hindawi was a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals active in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. It was founded in 1997 in Cairo, Egypt, and purchased in 2021 for $298 million by John Wiley & Sons, a large US-based publishing company.

Libertas Academica (LA) is an open access academic journal publisher specializing in the biological sciences and clinical medicine. It was acquired by SAGE Publications in September 2016.

Dove Medical Press is an academic publisher of open access peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals, with offices in Macclesfield, London, Princeton, New Jersey, and Auckland. In September 2017, Dove Medical Press was acquired by the Taylor and Francis Group.

MDPI is a publisher of open-access scientific journals. It publishes over 390 peer-reviewed, open access journals. MDPI is among the largest publishers in the world in terms of journal article output, and is the largest publisher of open access articles.

Entropy is a monthly open access scientific journal covering research on all aspects of entropy and information theory. It was established in 1999 and is published by MDPI. The journal occasionally publishes special issues compiled by guest editors. The editor-in-chief is Kevin H. Knuth.

Pulsus Group is a health informatics and digital marketing company and publisher of scientific, technical, and medical literature. It was formed in 1984, primarily to publish peer-reviewed medical journals. As of 2016, Pulsus published 98 hybrid and full open-access journals, 15 of which had been adopted as the official publications of related medical societies. Pulsus Group also conducts conferences in association with scientific societies.

Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is a predatory academic publisher of open-access electronic journals, conference proceedings, and scientific anthologies that are considered to be of questionable quality. As of December 2014, it offered 244 English-language open-access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine.

Frontiers in Psychology is a peer-reviewed open-access academic journal covering all aspects of psychology. It was established in 2010 and is published by Frontiers Media, a controversial company that is included in Jeffrey Beall's list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory publishers". The editor-in-chief is Axel Cleeremans.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OMICS Publishing Group</span> Discredited academic publishing company

OMICS Publishing Group is a predatory publisher of open access academic journals. It started publishing its first journal in 2008. By 2015, it claimed over 700 journals, although about half of them were defunct. Its subsidiaries and brands include Allied Academies, Conference Series LLC LTD, EuroSciCon LTD, Hilaris Publishing, iMedPub LTD, Longdom Publishing SL, Meetings International, Pulsus Group, Research & Reviews, SciTechnol, Trade Science Inc, Life Science Events, Walsh Medical Media, and IT Medical Team.

Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with offices in the United Kingdom, Spain, and China. In 2022, Frontiers employed more than 1,400 people, across 14 countries. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Predatory publishing</span> Fraudulent business model for scientific publications

Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors while only superficially checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. The rejection rate of predatory journals is low, but seldom zero. The phenomenon of "open access predatory publishers" was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship.

Beall's List was a prominent list of predatory open-access publishers that was maintained by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall on his blog Scholarly Open Access. The list aimed to document open-access publishers who did not perform real peer review, effectively publishing any article as long as the authors pay the article processing charge. Originally started as a personal endeavor in 2008, Beall's List became a widely followed piece of work by the mid-2010s. The list was used by scientists to identify exploitative publishers and detect publisher spam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Who's Afraid of Peer Review?</span> Science article by John Bohannon

"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by Science correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake scientific papers to 304 journals owned by fee-charging open access publishers. The papers, writes Bohannon, "were designed with such grave and obvious scientific flaws that they should have been rejected immediately by editors and peer reviewers", but 60% of the journals accepted them. The article and associated data were published in the 4 October 2013 issue of Science as open access.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Beall</span> American librarian

Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, who drew attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and created Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory open-access publishers. He is a critic of the open access publishing movement and particularly how predatory publishers use the open access concept, and is known for his blog Scholarly Open Access. He has also written on this topic in The Charleston Advisor, in Nature, in Learned Publishing, and elsewhere.

Neuropsychiatry is a quarterly peer-reviewed open access medical journal covering research on neuropsychiatry. The journal was established in 2011 and originally published by Future Medicine with Wayne Goodman and F. Markus Leweke serving as its founding editors-in-chief up to 2015. Under the Future Science imprint, the journal's impact factor ranged from 0.486 to 1.456 (2012-2015). Since 2016 it is published by Pulsus Group via its openaccessjournals.com imprint, which is on Jeffrey Beall's list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal had a 2016 journal impact factor of 4.778. However, that impact factor was based on a total of 9 "citable items" in 2014, as no articles were deemed "citable" in subsequent years, and in 2018 the journal was omitted from the 2017 Journal Citation Reports.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Future Medicine</span> British academic publisher

Future Medicine is a privately owned company based in London, England, United Kingdom. It is part of Future Science Publishing Group, primarily to publish peer-reviewed medical journals. Future Medicine publishes hybrid and full open access journals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Peters (publisher)</span> Biographies

Paul Harvey Peters is the non-Executive Board Chair of online conference software provider ExOrdo and from 2015 to 2021 was the chief executive Officer of the Open Access publisher Hindawi. He is past Chair of the Board of Crossref and was President of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) from 2013 to 2019. Peters is known for his work as an advocate for Open Access, open infrastructure for Open Science, and research integrity in the published literature.

Baishideng Publishing Group is a publisher of medical journals based in Pleasanton, California. It was established on January 15, 1993, and originally published only one journal: the Chinese-language Journal of New Digestology. Its second journal was the World Journal of Gastroenterology, originally launched in 1995 as the China National Journal of New Gastroenterology. As of 2017, the company published 43 journals, 42 in English and one in Chinese.

References

  1. 1 2 This article incorporates material from the OASPA website, which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
  2. ↑ "Announcing the launch of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA". EurekAlert!. AAAS. Retrieved 26 September 2018.
  3. ↑ "Founding Members". Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. Retrieved 2015-01-06.
  4. ↑ Beall, Jeffrey. "Beall's List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers". WordPress. Archived from the original on February 4, 2019. Retrieved March 17, 2021.
  5. ↑ Beall, Jeffrey (2017). "What I learned from predatory publishers". Biochemia Medica. 27 (2): 273–279. doi: 10.11613/BM.2017.029 . PMC   5493177 . PMID   28694718.
  6. ↑ MDPI (28 October 2015), , Update: Response to Mr. Jeffrey Beall’s Repeated Attacks on MDPI
  7. ↑ Salo, Dorothea (February 26, 2010). "OASPA: act now or lose credibility forever". ScienceBlogs. Retrieved October 18, 2018.
  8. ↑ Harnad, Stevan (December 12, 2009). "Critique of Criteria for "Full Membership" in OASPA ("Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association")". ePrints.org. Retrieved October 18, 2018.
  9. ↑ "OASPA Conference". OASPA. Retrieved March 17, 2021.
  10. ↑ "General Comments from the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA to The Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Federal Government, the United States of America" (PDF). White House Archives. February 1, 2010. Retrieved October 18, 2018.
  11. ↑ Open Definition, accessed February 13, 2011
  12. ↑ "Membership Criteria". Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. OASPA. Retrieved 26 September 2018.
  13. ↑ "Membership Dues". Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. OASPA. Retrieved 26 September 2018.
  14. ↑ "Members", Oaspa.org, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, retrieved 17 March 2021
  15. ↑ "Fully OA Publishers". Fully OA Publishers.
  16. ↑ Redhead, Claire (4 October 2013). "OASPA's response to the recent article in Science entitled "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?"". Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. Retrieved 21 October 2013.
  17. ↑ Gamboa, Camille. "Statement by SAGE on the Journal of International Medical Research". Sage. Retrieved 18 October 2018.
  18. ↑ Shaffi, Sarah (29 April 2014). "OASPA reinstates Sage membership". The Bookseller . Retrieved 2 June 2014.
  19. ↑ Redhead, Claire (23 September 2015). "Dove Medical Press reinstated as OASPA Members". Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. Retrieved 1 February 2016.

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