PSI Blog 20190116 Open-Access Plan in Europe Bans Publishing in
Paywalled Journals
One
of the irritating characteristics of the establishment is its tendency to
profit from the tax dollars we contribute to scientific research. True,
publishing used to be extremely expensive. No longer. Even though publishers
now contribute little to the process, they still want their money. Peer
reviewers check for errors—for free, authors do the formatting—for free, and
“publishers” provide the website amenable to downloading—for money. If you do
not have a subscription or belong to an institution that has one, you have to
pay around $35 for a digital copy of a single journal article.
If
you are an independent researcher or belong to a struggling institution in a
developing country, you are out of luck.
All
this flies in the face of a basic scientific principle: Scientific knowledge
is the property of all humanity and should be available to all. Enter the
“Open Access” movement, which is trying to make this principle a reality. As a
result, an increasing number of scientific papers are now available as free digital
versions. Unfortunately, authors often have to pay thousands of dollars to make
a paper available as Open Access.
On
the other hand, research performed by U.S. government employees generally is
not copywrited and pdf versions of the original government press copies are
becoming increasingly available. For over a decade, NIH grantees have been
required to provide copies of their peer-reviewed, published works to Pub Med
Central, which charges no download fee. Now, the Open Access movement is
gathering steam in Europe where the usual “paywall scheme” is the target of
attack:
Thanks
to Wolfgang Muss for this heads-up:
Of course, that is of dubious value to
those of us who challenge the absurdities of the Big Bang Theory. The guardians
of the current paradigm supposedly use a “peer review” process that nonetheless
allows all sorts of illogical inanities. If you do not attack the BBT directly
or mention the A-word (aether), you can publish on the explosion from nothing,
universal expansion, extra-Euclidean dimensions, wormholes, immaterial fields, massless
particles and their perpetual motion, etc. We should not be surprised that
demands for payment are critical for maintaining the cosmogonical elite that
accepts such “junk science.” In this case, the peer review system has failed
miserably.
Don’t get me wrong. Peer
review generally adds value to almost every investigation. Adequate review can
catch mistakes in logic, interpretation, and math before they mislead a wider
audience. That is why we consider “predatory journals” to be so pernicious.
They typically charge exorbitant fees for publication without suitable review.[1]
Most researchers have never heard of these journals and they are seldom cited.
Even legitimate websites have been hijacked, with unsuspecting researchers
submitting payments to fraudsters and papers that will never be published.[2]
With all the censorship accorded those who dare to oppose the BBT, how is
anyone able to publish legitimate work?
Publishing for Free
That is a good question. The
Open Access movement and the attack on pay walls are obvious products of the
digital age. This will continue until all research is freely available. Don’t hold
your breath. In the meantime, there are plenty of places to publish on the Internet.
You can follow the guidelines for a suitable website (e.g., www.scientificphilosophy.com), or
put your work on viXra (e.g., http://vixra.org/abs/1806.0165),
www.ResearchGate.net , or www.Academia.edu, etc. EBooks
and paperbacks now can be published for free on Amazon (https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/). All this is possible without having to deal with peer reviewers
who think the universe exploded out of nothing!
BTW: A few journals encourage
authors opposed to the current nonsense. You might try: General Science Journal
(free) or Physics Essays ($137 page charge for you and $17 pay wall fee for your readers).
[1] Dadkhah, Mehdi, and
Borchardt, Glenn, 2016, Guidelines for selecting journals that avoid fraudulent
practices in scholarly publishing: Iranian Journal of Management Studies, v. 9,
no. 3, p. 529-538. [http://ijms.ut.ac.ir/article_57540_c9dfe9455568d200e6c29a923ecdf887.pdf].
Dadkhah, M., and Borchardt,
G., 2016, Victimizing Researchers by Phishing: Razavi Int J Med, v. 4, no. 3,
p. e40304. [10.17795/rijm40304].
Dadkhah, Mehdi, Borchardt,
Glenn, Lagzian, Mohammad, and Bianciardi, Giorgio, 2017, Academic Journals
Plagued by Bogus Impact Factors: Publishing Research Quarterly, p. 1-5.
[10.1007/s12109-017-9509-4].
Dadkhah, Mehdi, Borchardt,
Glenn, and Maliszewski, Tomasz, 2016, Fraud in Academic Publishing: Researchers
Under Cyber Attacks: The American Journal of Medicine [10.1016/j.amjmed.2016.08.030].
Dadkhah, Mehdi, Kahani,
Mohsen, and Borchardt, Glenn, 2017, A Method for Improving the Integrity of
Peer Review: Science and Engineering Ethics [10.1007/s11948-017-9960-9].
Dadkhah, Mehdi, Lagzian,
Mohammad, and Borchardt, Glenn, 2017, Identity Theft in the Academic World
Leads to Junk Science: Science and Engineering Ethics, p. 1-4.
[10.1007/s11948-016-9867-x].
Dadkhah, Mehdi, Mohammad,
Lagzian, and Borchardt, Glenn, 2016, Is retraction sufficient for medical
papers?: Pol Arch Med Wewn, v. 126, p. 1017-1018. [10.20452/pamw.3727.].
Dadkhah, Mehdi, Mohammad,
Lagzian, and Borchardt, Glenn, 2017, Questionable Papers in Citation Databases
as an Issue for Literature Review: Journal of Cell Communication and Signaling,
p. 1-5. [10.1007/s12079-016-0370-6].
[2] Andoohgin Shahri,
Mona, Jazi, Mohammad Davarpanah, Borchardt, Glenn, and Dadkhah, Mehdi, 2017,
Detecting Hijacked Journals by Using Classification Algorithms: Science and
Engineering Ethics, p. 1-14. [10.1007/s11948-017-9914-2].
Dadkhah, Mehdi, and
Borchardt, Glenn, 2016, Hijacked Journals: An Emerging Challenge for Scholarly
Publishing: Aesthetic Surgery Journal, p. 1-3. [10.1093/asj/sjw026].
Dadkhah, M., and Borchardt,
G., 2016, Victimizing Researchers by Phishing: Razavi Int J Med, v. 4, no. 3,
p. e40304. [10.17795/rijm40304].
Dadkhah, Mehdi, Borchardt,
Glenn, and Lagzian, Mohammad, 2017, Do You Ignore Information Security in Your
Journal Website?: Science and Engineering Ethics, v. 23, no. 4, p. 1227-1231.
[10.1007/s11948-016-9849-z].
Dadkhah, Mehdi, Mohammad,
Lagzian, and Borchardt, Glenn, 2016, The Game of Hacking Academic Websites:
World Digital Libraries, v. 9, no. 2, p. 131-133.
[10.18329/09757597/2016/9210].
Dadkhah, Mehdi, Seno, Seyed
Amin Hosseini, and Borchardt, Glenn, 2017, Current and potential cyber attacks
on medical journals; guidelines for improving security: European Journal of
Internal Medicine, v. 38, p. 25-29. [10.1016/j.ejim.2016.11.014].
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