On 12 October 2013 20:28, Stevan Harnad <amscifo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It is a specific problem of *peer review standards of pay-to-publish Gold
> OA journals* at a time when there is still far too little OA and when
> most journals are still subscription journals, most authors are still
> confused about OA, many think that OA is synonymous with Gold OA journals,
> and, most important, there are not yet enough effective mandates from
> research funders and institutions that require authors to make all their
> papers OA by depositing them in their institutional OA repositories ("Green
> OA"), regardless of where they were published.
>
Telling authors that pay-to-publish Gold OA journals are bad (when they are
not per se, just the known predatory ones), and then mandating that they
make their papers "open access" (well, public access, by depositing to the
repository), is hardly going to make them less confused.
> And each round of peer review (which peers do for free, by the way, so the
> only real cost is the qualified editor who evaluates the submissions, picks
> the referees, and adjudicates the referee reports -- plus the referee
> tracking and communication software) would be paid for on a "no-fault"
> basis, *per round of peer review*, whether the outcome was acceptance,
> rejection, or revision and resubmission for another (paid) round of peer
> review.
>
> Unlike with today's Fool's Gold junk journals that were caught by
> Bohannon's sting, not only will no-fault post-Green, Fair-Gold peer-review
> remove any incentive to accept lower quality papers (and thereby reduce the
> reputation of the journal) -- because the journal is paid for the peer
> review service in any case -- but it will help make Fair-Gold OA costs even
> lower, per round of peer review, because it will not wrap the costs of the
> rejected or multiply revised and re-refereed papers into the cost of each
> accepted paper, as they do now.
>
Nope. It will replace the incentive to publish lower quality papers with
minimal peer review, with an incentive to run it through a couple of peer
review rounds. And as you can't actually force journals to adopt this
model, then there will always remain predatory journals that provide a
means for lower quality papers to be published.
G
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