We are truly in the era of information overload. New medical and scientific journals spring up daily. For the last 3 months, in anticipation of writing this inaugural editorial, I did not delete e-mail announcements for new respiratory/pulmonary journals. Amazingly I received 8 announcements for new journals and one invitation to an open-access online book on COPD ()! The proliferation of medical journals has been going on for a number of years and is driven by three main factors: online only journals, the open-access movement, characterized by the “author pays” model, and the upsurge globally in research output, which increases the pressure to publish. Traditionally journals were funded by subscriptions and advertising; producing and distributing a hard copy journal were expensive. The production costs of an online journal are minimal by comparison. While online journals often do sell subscriptions to institutions and consortia, pressures on library budgets and the relative lack of advertiser support for online journals have contributed to a change in the business model. Coupled with the mandate of many research funders to make the research they support free for all to read, these economic changes have led to the surge in journals supported by “Article Processing Charges,” which allow journals to be freely accessible, but require authors, their institutions or their funders to contribute to the cost of publishing.
Table 1. Recently announced respiratory journals.
It has been estimated that the world's scientific output doubles every 9 yearsCitation1 and this knowledge is increasingly being published and archived solely online. With this explosion of knowledge, who is in charge of quality control? The answer should be editors and peer reviewers, and this is still often the case. But the sheer number of open-access journals and the practices of some shady publishers make it difficult for the community to distinguish the reputable journals in the crowd. The services that offer quality assessment of journals, including PubMed and Thomson Reuters, have been deluged with applications, which may mean that a particular journal can take years to get indexed and to acquire an Impact Factor. The extent of this tsunami is recorded in The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ https://doaj.org/), which is a community-curated online site that maintains a directory of open-access journals that presently lists over 9000 journals from 128 countries and over 2.3 million individual articles. The site describes the screening process DOAJ requires for journals to be listed. The DOAJ Principles of Transparency include statements about peer review and fee structure. However the obvious allure of easy money has spawned a vast industry of questionable journals and practices that have produced a crisis in the scientific publishing industry.
In 2013 John Bohannon a Harvard scientist and journalist conducted an elaborate sting operation to assess the rigor of peer review in open access, online only journals.Citation2 He invented a seriously flawed series of papers reportedly showing anti-cancer activity of extracts of lichens and sent the articles to 304 online pay-to-publish journals. More than half of the journals accepted the paper despite its fatal flaws and the majority did so without peer review or even when peer review suggested rejection! Fourty-five percent of the online publishers who accepted the bogus papers had been screened and listed by DOAJ illustrating that more stringent quality control is needed.
In 2016 the Ottawa Citizen newspaper conducted a sting operation of its own. They submitted a totally fictional article complete with nonsense words and jumbled sentences to an online journal, the Journal of Clinical Research and Bioethics, which is owned by OMICS International based in Hyderabad, India (http://www.omicsonline.org/benefits-of-publishing.php). The paper was accepted and appeared in the November 22, 2016 issue of the journal. OMICS International has a reputation as a “predatory publisher” and recently the US Federal Trade Commission charged OMICS International with deceiving authors through hidden charges. It called the company “scammers.”Citation3
Predatory journals charge authors thousands of dollars to “publish” by simply posting their PDF online. Since they do not bear the costs of printing the articles on paper or in many cases even editing them, they reap huge profits.
The crisis spurred Jeffrey Beall, a librarian from the University of Colorado, Denver, to develop a website devoted to “outing” questionable journals: Beall's List of Predatory Publishers. Starting in 2011 with an initial list of 18 journals it grew to over 1000 journals () before closing for reasons that are unclear early this year.Citation4
Table 2. Beall's list of questionable publishers.
Despite the abuses, online publishing has many advantages. Chief among these advantages is the ability to make the articles open access. Open-access publishing has revolutionized the dissemination of scientific results. Making a scientific article open access means that it can reach a much wider audience rapidly and with no charges to institutions, authors, and readers. Many highly reputable journals offer immediate open access based on a user pay remuneration formula. An example is the suite of 8 journals published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS journals). PLoS is a nonprofit, open-access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open-access journals. PLoS began in 2000 in response to an online petition signed by thousands of scientists pledging to discontinue submission of papers to journals that did not grant free access to their papers immediately or after a delay of no more than 6 months. PLoS offsets expenses related to peer review management, journal production, and online hosting and archiving by charging an article processing charge (APC) to authors, institutions or funders for each article published.
But what if you cannot afford to pay the APC? There are a number of options. More and more funders are insisting that the research they support is published in open-access journals and many of them provide some or all of the money to cover APCs. Funders increasingly allow publishing fees to be included as line items on grants or provide specific article processing grants. A list of funders who support publication costs can be found at https://www.plos.org/open-access-funds#loc-funders and the list includes the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Heart and Stroke Foundation (not the Canadian Lung Association (CLA) or Provincial Lung Associations yet). In addition there is a steady rise in the number of institutional-based, open-access funds, which will provide financial resources to publish in open-access journals including 14 Canadian universities (https://www.plos.org/open-access-funds).
Another example of a reputable online open-access publisher is BioMed Central (BMC), a UK-based for-profit scientific publisher specializing in open-access journal publication. BioMed Central is owned by Springer Nature and publishes 290 open-access journals, including a collection of 65 online research journals with “BMC” in the title. Among the BMC journals are BMC Pulmonary Medicine (http://bmcpulmmed.biomedcentral.com/) and Respiratory Research (http://respiratory-research.biomedcentral.com/). BMC Pulmonary Medicine also uses open peer review in which the names of authors and reviewers are known to each other, and reviews are available online. Authors who pay to publish in the BMC and some other online journals retain the copyright to their work but license it under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows the material, including images, to be reused and redistributed provided the original work is correctly cited.
Thomson Reuters's Web of Science lists 55 respiratory journals with impact factors ranging from 0.256 (Revue Pneumologie Clinique) to 15.6 (Lancet Respiratory Medicine). Of these only 8 are considered full open-access journals defined as immediate online access to all. These are shown in .
Table 3. Open-access respiratory journals according to Web of Science.
Thirty-two of 50 respiratory journals listed at the Scimago Journal and Country Ranking site (http://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?category=2740&openaccess=false) are listed as open access presumably since they conform to the immediate or minimal 6-month embargo. Interestingly the journals with the highest impact factors (Lancet Respiratory Medicine, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Thorax, ERJ, Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation and Sleep Medicine Reviews) are subscription-based or hybrid subscription/open access and are not included in the 32.
So you naturally ask, why another respiratory journal? Why is the Canadian Thoracic Society (CTS) launching the Canadian Journal of Respiratory, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine into this maelstrom? As you remember the CTS had an “official” journal, the Canadian Respiratory Journal that was published by the Pulsus Group. However last year Pulsus sold the journal including the name and copyright to all previous articles to a large open-access publishing company, Hindawi. Hindawi did not appear on Beall's list of Predatory Publishers but he did question some of its practices. Although the CRJ continues to be published, CTS chose not to retain it as its official journal, which left the Society without a scientific forum to communicate with its membership and to publish guidelines, position papers, and scholarly work relevant to the Canadian and international respiratory community.
The new journal, the Red and White, fulfills this gap.
What will the publishing model of the Canadian Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care be? We have selected a hybrid model that will be subscription-based but will include open-access publication if the authors, funders or institutions cover publication costs. A hard copy of the journal and immediate online access to papers will be available to all CTS members. The journal will be published by Taylor & Francis, which is a large, reputable, and global publisher. The CTS is working with the Canadian Sleep Society and the Canadian Critical Care Society to try to emulate this model for their membership. Advertising will appear in the hard copy of the journal.
I believe that CTS can develop a world-class respiratory journal that will become an important source of knowledge and information, not only for respirologists and other respiratory health professionals but also for those involved in the pulmonary aspects of Critical Care and Sleep Medicine. Canada has a long history of excellence, innovation, and enviable research productivity in the fields of Respiratory, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine. The new CTS journal will be a platform to communicate this outstanding work.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Ms. Morna Conway for advice in the preparation of this editorial.
References
- Van Noorden A. Global scientific output doubles every nine years. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-output-doubles-every-nine-years.html. Published May 7, 2014. Accessed January 5, 2017.
- Bohannon J. Who's afraid of peer review? Science 2013;342(6154):60–65. doi: 10.1126/science.342.6154.60.
- Bohannon J. U.S. charges journal publisher with misleading authors. Science 2016;354:23–24.
- Retraction Watch. Why did Beall's List of potential predatory publishers go dark? http://retractionwatch.com/2017/01/17/bealls-list-potential-predatory-publishers-go-dark/. Accessed March 30, 2017.