Just as an illustration of how predatory journals use Open Access in their business, I received yesterday “a cordial call for paper invitation” from the “Journal of Clinical and Medical Images, Case Reports with ISSN 2771-019X and Impact Factor 2.1.” In the subject line it said “Now Accepting Submissions – No Article Processing Fee, Only DOI Fee”.
This was new to me – a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) fee? As one of the elected founder members of the International DOI Foundation back in 1999, I knew perfectly well that there is no charge for a DOI if you publish in a journal (the cost to the publisher is a negligible $1 per DOI and to a pre-print repository $0.15 per DOI).
So I wrote to the journal editor to ask “How much is the DOI fee?” and got the following reply: “Since it is an invited submission, we charge 220 USD only towards the manuscript DOI expenses.” 220 USD!!! And when I asked if it was possible to publish without the DOI, I was told no, since “DOI is a digital object identifier of your work and gives international visibility.” At least the last part was correct. This was clearly an Article Processing Charge (APC) in disguise. DOIs are certainly valuable, but they are free to authors.
This kind of blatant, unscrupulous financial twisting is injurious to authors, to the good name of publishers, and to the resulting quality of science. We need to find some method to shut down such abusers of trust. Open Access has this unfortunate downside of facilitating predatory journals.
Chris Zielinski
Centre for Global Health, University of Winchester, UK and
President, World Association of Medical Editors (WAME)
Blogs; http://ziggytheblue.wordpress.com and http://ziggytheblue.tumblr.com
Publications: http://www.researchgate.net and https://winchester.academia.edu/ChrisZielinski/
HIFA profile: Chris Zielinski: As a Visiting Fellow and Lecturer at the Centre for Global Health, University of Winchester, Chris leads the Partnerships in Health Information (Phi) programme, which supports knowledge development and brokers healthcare information exchanges of all kinds. He is President of the World Association of Medical Editors. Chris has held senior positions in publishing and knowledge management with WHO in Brazzaville, Geneva, Cairo and New Delhi, with FAO in Rome, ILO in Geneva, and UNIDO in Vienna. He served on WHO's Ethical Review Committee, and was an originator of the African Health Observatory. He also spent three years in London as Chief Executive of the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society. Chris has been a director of the UK Copyright Licensing Agency, Educational Recording Agency, and International Association of Audiovisual Writers and Directors. He has served on the boards of several NGOs and ethics groupings (information and computer ethics and bioethics). chris AT chriszielinski.com. His publications are at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chris-Zielinski and https://winchester.academia.edu/ChrisZielinski/ and his blogs are http://ziggytheblue.wordrpress.com and https://www.tumblr.com/blog/ziggytheblue