We noticed a blog entry with the title “Open Access Linguistics: You’re Doing It Wrong”. It was released online with date 2014-04-02 and marked online as 2014-04-01:
We are not taking this as a April Fool’s Day joke and would like to make clarifications for our readers, authors, reviewers, Editorial Board members who always support us.
The blogger George Walkden accuses SCIRP’s journal Open Journal of Modern Linguistics (OJML) of “charging stupidly high APCs” ($ 600 for a paper with maximum 10 pages). He also explains that “Elsevier charge up to $ 5000”. Let’s compare with three more sources:
In addition, it is also helpful to keep in mind the “82 Things Publishers Do”.
We conclude: APCs at OJML of $ 600 are clearly on the low side among offers. Gold Open Access publishing is much more than putting a PDF online.
Established/traditional publishers with “legitimate journals” now moving into Open Access publishing are never afraid to charge very high APCs. The blogger follows a view – mostly supported in the USA – with an expectation that every (commercial) publishing model based on APC larger than $ 0 has to deliver the same established high “editorial and publishing services” (value). This is a strange view as in most other areas of life we can freely select between products of different levels of value and price as long as defined minimum (safety) standards are met.What normally counts is “value for money” – also at OJML. In contrast, the Open Access discussion is already dominated by established/traditional publishers lobbying for a view “high value no matter how high the price”. These publishers expect big grant-money to come soon to fund almost any level of APCs.
We conclude: Not everyone can afford any level of APCs. OJML at SCIRP offers accepted Open Access standards according to OASPA and DOAJ and value for money.
Fixed price or price depending on page length? SCIRP believes it is a better option to charge authors for the amount of work they produce in manuscript handling and typesetting. The effort in manuscript handling has a constant and a variable, paper length-dependent part. For this reason, APC at SCIRP increase for each additional page above the tenth page. This gives an incentive to write short and precise. In this way, short papers remain financially viable without subsidizing longer papers.
According to Walkden OJML is about “opportunistic money-making” and “creepy graspingness”. Impressive words, a linguist at its best.
Walkden criticizes SCIRP’s OJML to show “wrong” dates on some papers for “received, revised, accepted, published”. Thanks, SCIRP checked the dates on OJML’s papers andcorrected where necessary.
Walkden took the OJML paper by Muriungi, Mutegi and Karuri as an example to point out shortcomings in terms of typesetting quality. SCIRP is always ready for improvements andcorrected the typesetting errors in this and other papers. Walkden further about the paper: “a valuable syntactic description of an aspect of an understudied language”. Actually, the authors, coming from Kenya, paid for the paper onky reduced APC (even much less than announced in SCIRP’s partial fee waiver). APCs charged for the paper were no more than $ 200.
George Walkden is an Associate Editor of the “Journal of Historical Syntax” (JHS) (ISSN 2163-6001). It is “an open-access journal, but articles published will not be available free of charge immediately. Instead there will be a twelve-month embargo period, after which articles will be available free on the … website. During those 12 months, access will be … behind a paywall. This embargo can be skipped, for a fee of $400.” (http://elanguage.net/journals/jhs/index). With an embargo period the journal does not even qualify to be indexed in DOAJ. The journal started in 2011 and seems to have published only 7 articles open access since then. Articles do not have DOIs. The journal is not indexed, not archived, not included in Sherpa/Romeo, and has no APC waiver policy. The journal does not display dates for “received, revised, accepted, and published”.
We conclude: “Journal of Historical Syntax: Your’re Doing It Wrong”. It is always easy to criticize, but difficult to do it better in all aspects. Later with more than 7 articles online at JHS and hence more experience in Open Access publishing things will certainly also improve at JHS.
Unfortunately, the blogger is cutting the longer story “Why is SCIRP located in China?” short and gets it wrong. Correct and still concise is: SCIRP is located in China, because owner and staff live there. The company is registered in Delaware, because authors prefer a company which is US registered, the state of Delaware offers it, and the state of Delaware makes “creepy” money with it.
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