Hello all, Thank you for the responses sent through to my specific question about a particular publisher being identified as 'Australian'. It has sparked a secondary discussion about the value or otherwise of locating a publisher in a particular country - and the value judgements that might be subsequently assigned.
While this in itself is a worthwhile discussion, I would like to note the reason why I was trying to establish the number of Australian OA journals in the first place. In OA advocacy (which is primarily my job) much of what needs to be done is convince people (either individual researchers , institutions or governments) that open access is worthwhile, worth investing in and also that any investment has been well spent. To do this we need numbers and benchmarks. I can't speak for other places around the world but in Australia we are having difficulty obtaining even basic information about where we stand internationally in open access stakes. While we were early adopters of institutional repository software and have full coverage across out institutions of operational repositories, over one quarter of our universities have open access policies and our two primary government funding bodies have open access policies we do not know whether this has translated into a high level of open access research here. A paper about the Australian situation is here http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/viewFile/39/121 We do not currently have any automated way of knowing how much material is available within repositories as full text open access nor do we know what percentage of the previous year's research is now available open access (which could be benchmarked). On the other road, we could potentially create a system to pull information from our publication reporting to find out what we are publishing in fully open access journals (but we don't have it now), and we do not know what or where we are spending on APCs (so we have very little idea about how much we are publishing as hybrid OA). One number that relatively simply could be collected is the number of open access journals Australia is publishing. Hence the original question. Danny From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jean-Claude Guédon Sent: Thursday, 27 March 2014 2:00 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [GOAL] Re: Question why journals in DOAJ are being listed as 'Australian' Beall's remark about the importance of the country where a publication is located, if he is right, fully demonstrates how stupid the evaluation process has become. The next step, I suppose, is to create a ranking of countries and thus establish their status with regard to scientific publishing. It also leads to really weird forms of reasoning such as: a press in Brazil, or India, or China, or Russia, is obviously not as good as a press in the US, in Britain, in Holland, etc... What about Italy? Greece? Portugal? What about Mexico? What about South Africa? What about the rest of Africa? Is Australia OK? How many implicit forms of racism or cultural arrogance are hidden in such a perspective? Jean-Claude Guédon Le mardi 25 mars 2014 à 17:42 -0600, Beall, Jeffrey a écrit : Danny, I have been monitoring this publisher closely recently. I regularly receive inquiries about it -- researchers asking me whether it is predatory or not. I currently do not have it included on the list of predatory publishers. Contrary to an opinion expressed earlier, for many, the country of publication is very important. Researchers in many countries get more academic credit towards tenure, promotion, and the annual evaluation when they publish in a journal based in a western country. (This is why many predatory publishers often pretend to be from western countries). I recently posted an inquiry on this list seeking comments about this company's peer-review portability policy (it allows authors themselves to transfer peer reviews from the rejecting publisher to Ivyspring.) Ivyspring until recently said it was based in Wyoming, NSW. Now they've changed their official address to this: Ivyspring International Publisher Pty Ltd Level 32, 1 Market Street Sydney, NSW 2000 Australia That address matches the address of Alliance Business Centers<http://www.abcn.com/offices-sydney--level-32-1-market-street-3264>, a virtual office company. Also, according to an Australian business directory, the publisher's owner is Jinxin Jason Lin. I think it's safe to say this company lacks needed transparency. Who owns it? Where are they based? What experience do the owners have with scholarly publishing? Why are they using a virtual office as their headquarters address? What is the extent of this company's connection to Australia? To other countries? --Jeffrey Beall From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Danny Kingsley Sent: Monday, March 24, 2014 10:46 PM To: '[email protected]' Subject: [GOAL] Question why journals in DOAJ are being listed as 'Australian' Hello all, I recently looked at the DOAJ list of Australian journals to determine how many Australian OA journals charge an APC. Of the list of 115 journals on the DOAJ, 12 charge an APC. However on investigation seven of these 12 do not appear to be Australian journals at all. There is no definitive list of Australian OA journals - the AOASG page http://aoasg.org.au/open-access-in-action/australian-oa-journals/ lists 150 (compared to the smaller DOAJ list) and before I investigated this it did not include the five genuinely OA Australian journals that charge an APC. My questions are: · Does anyone know why these journals would be appearing on DOAJ as 'Australian'? · Five of them are published by Ivyspring International Publishers - does anyone know anything about this publisher? Thanks Danny Journal Publisher APC Notes Journal of Genomics<http://www.jgenomics.com/> Ivyspring International Publisher No publication charge during the current promotional period of this journal Not published in Australia and only one Australian listed in the Editorial Board. Theranostics<http://www.thno.org/> Ivyspring International Publisher $100AUD Not published in Australia and there are no Australians listed in the Editorial Board International Journal of Electronics, Engineering and Computer Systems<http://www.irphouse.com/elect/ijece.htm> International Research Publication House $150USD Not published in Australia and there are no Australians listed in the Editorial Board Asian Journal of Crop Science<http://scialert.net/current.php?issn=1994-7879> Asian Network for Scientific Information $370AUD There is no direct website for the journal and it is difficult to determine the countries the Editorial Board come from Journal of Cancer<http://www.jcancer.org/> Ivyspring International Publisher $1100AUD Not published in Australia and only one Australian listed in the Editorial Board. International Journal of Biological Sciences<http://www.ijbs.com/> Ivyspring International Publisher $1450AUD Not published in Australia and only two Australians listed in the Editorial Board. International Journal of Medical Sciences<http://www.medsci.org/> Ivyspring International Publisher $1450AUD Not published in Australia and only two Australians listed in the Editorial Board. Dr Danny Kingsley ------------------------------------------ Executive Officer Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG) Menzies Library, Building 2 The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 Australia E: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> P: +612 6125 6839 W: http://aoasg.org.au T: @openaccess_oz Cricos Provider - 00120C NOTE: I work three days a week: Mondays (on campus), Tuesdays and Thursdays. I think about open access 24/7. _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal
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