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The downsides of OA

Like everything else, OA model has some advantages and some disadvantages. The advantages are discussed thoroughly in this page but the downsides of OA are not mentioned at all. Here are a few sources that can be used on this topic:

Some Online Journals Will Publish Fake Science, For A Fee

What the Open-Access Movement Doesn't Want You to Know

The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access

How is open access accused of being predatory? The impact of Beall’s lists of predatory journals on academic publishing

Replication Crisis

Marzbans ( talk) 06:51, 22 October 2021 (UTC) reply

Sort of. Some of the criticisms above are of predatory publishers (on which there's already a section in the page), and which are important not to conflate with OA in general. A couple of the links are also just opinion pieces by Jeffrey Beall, who is certainly an important critic, but some of the 'anti-corporatist movement' criticism is more a political stance than a criticism of OA. The replication crisis link isn't really relevant, since it's just pointing out an anecdote of a rubbish article published by an OA journal, and there are similar anecdotes for articles in paywalled/subscription journals. Frustratingly, I've not found any metanalysis of the quantitative studies done, and most of those either had no subscription journal control group ( example) or were only submitted to subscription journals ( example).
However I think warranted could be:
  • some notes on APC inflation (and comparison to subscription inflation)
  • quality comparisons to subscription journals (if there are quantitative studies around).
  • clarification of limitations of parts of the ecosystem (predatory publishers already given sufficient space TBH), possibly a bit on basing policy on preprints (the current section on Effect of preprints on later publication is way too long).
What do people think? T.Shafee(Evo&Evo) talk 04:31, 24 October 2021 (UTC) reply
Actually I found Whitfield's Replication crisis insightful, given the fact that Jeffrey Beall is now being openly criticized for his views on OA. On the DOAJ list, which is unrelated to Beall's work, only 10% of the indexed journals meet the basic standards of academic publishing ( [1]). They have all sorts of problems, some lack article identifiers (such as DOI), or the required licenses, and sometimes articles simply vanish because the journal does not offer stable digital preservation of the articles. There is no shortage of articles discussing the OA movement, It is no surprise that most praise OA movement, but some give a more critical perspective. You are right, the APC fees are high, Vervoort et al ( [2]), says it is on average 3000$ for Cardiology journals. Regarding the quality of journals, I think a small percentage of OA journals publish worthy articles. If you take a look at the first 100 journals with the highest impact and notability you will notice that only 5 journals are OA and the rest are non-OA ( [3]). All that said, imo, what this page needs is a criticism section discussing how the OA is being abused. The OA movement certainly benefits everyone, but in accordance with NPOV policy we also need to address how the model is being abused. Marzbans ( talk) 14:38, 24 October 2021 (UTC) reply

Editing for grad school project

Hi! I'm an library science grad student taking a look at this page as part of a Wikipedia editing assignment for a course on Information Policy. This page has been identified by our instructor as needing some work, both structurally and for minor issues. I'm going to be making some edits, most likely starting with working on wordiness and readability but I wanted to introduce myself as you may be seeing a lot of edits from a new user! I'm reviewing the talk page for areas that have been previously highlighted for improvement. Feel free to share priorities or feedback.~~~~ ACBatSLIS ( talk) 18:30, 1 March 2023 (UTC) reply

New book out March 2023

Baldwin, Peter (2023). Athena unbound : why and how scholarly knowledge should be free for all. Cambridge, Massachusetts. ISBN  9780262048002.{{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link)

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048002/athena-unbound/

I think this book tries to be a complete story of open access, and as such, should be a resource for developing this article. I do not yet have a copy. Bluerasberry (talk) 18:43, 18 March 2023 (UTC) reply

Venn diagram

The "Venn diagram highlighting the key features of different types of open access in scholarly publishing" contains mistakes. For example Gold OA and Diamond OA are exclusive, with Gold OA restricted to "author pays", whereas the definition of Gold OA in the page specifies correctly:

The majority of gold open access journals charging APCs follow an "author-pays" model,[13] although this is not an intrinsic property of gold OA.

The diagram also includes two types of "Vanity press", neither of which are defined in the page nor in the source article [4]. Marcrr ( talk) 15:04, 1 December 2023 (UTC) reply

I agree. The conflation of "gold" with "APC" is a long standing and frustrating mistake for many. If reproduced here, it should be explained that some people define "gold OA" as for-fee even though the label was not intended to mean that. Diprose, et al. reflect on this problem ( [5] https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3398). They propose a less complicated set of labels without really resolving the problem that these labels are meant to describe both how things are paid for and what version they might be. They focus on the latter. -- Jaireeodell ( talk) 20:29, 1 December 2023 (UTC) reply

I've removed the diagram. There's no need to keep such obviously incorrect imagery. Nemo 18:48, 2 December 2023 (UTC) reply