Hanken open access research widely reported in international media
A study by Hanken information systems researchers Cenyu Shen and Bo-Christer Björk: ”Predatory open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics”, published in the open access journal BMC Medicine (impact factor 7.4), has been reported on in several influential science magazines including Science and Times Higher Education. Within a week from publication the article was downloaded over 10,000 times.
The study focused on the radical reversal of business model of scientific peer reviewed journals made possible by the Internet. There are already several thousand respectable journals using this model in which authors pay for the service, but in which the articles are freely available for readers. However, the ease of setting up web sites for such journals has also paved the way for the rapid emergence of so-called “predatory” publishers, who misleadingly pretend to produce properly peer reviewed journals, while only being interested in collecting article processing charges to their bank accounts, often located in tax havens. They are very noticeable due to the massive amount of spam email they send academics around the world.
In the study Shen and Björk show that predatory journals have increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 journals. These journals are predominantly published in countries like India and Nigeria, in spite of often misleading names beginning with ”International” or ”American”. Even more importantly, authors publishing in such journals are concentrated to a few Asian and African countries, as a result of the academic evaluation practices stressing ”international publication” in those countries.