Pay to Play—Publish for a Price: The Myths and Manipulation of the New Corporate Open-Access Journals

Abstract

As publish or perish turns into publish and also perish, academic journals have transformed. As I explain in “Peer Reviewing is Becoming More Cavalier, Self-Serving and Ignorant” (Times Higher Education, June 2, 2022); “Academics’ Publishing Options are an Ever Wilder West. Beware!” (Times Higher Education, June 24, 2022); and “Editors Have Become So Wayward that Academic Authors Need a Bill of Rights” (Times Higher Education, August 18, 2022), this is not for the better.

The newest site of scholarly misconduct is fraudulent Open-Access pseudo-publishing by South Asia-based (especially Bangladesh) “corporations” with pay-for-play predominantly online so-called journals. Incessant email spamming with disregard of repeated requests to unsubscribe led me to investigate them.

That inclination intersected with the increasing failures of other journals’ reviewers and editors. This combined with higher education periodical and business page reports on debates on the movement toward Open Access publishing and its conflicts with traditional subscription and academic organizations’ periodicals led me to conduct a controlled experiment.

I chose three similarly named new “journals,” all with the same pronouncements and publishing arrangements. Their only difference is that two charge a publishing fee of $200 and the other $100. Unlike other, more established Open Access journals who waived their fees for a retired professor with no institutional support, none allowed any exception to pay for play.