Dear Colleagues,

I’m enjoying this discussion. Regarding open-access versus print journals, I’ve worked in both and the quality is the same however there was a tonne of work I did in the open access journal in terms of maintaining the journal site, devising the journal’s templates, copy-editing etc. that in my experience with print journals, is undertaken by someone who works for the publisher and is paid. As an academic, I’m still not being ‘paid’ for the work I put into editing the journal by the publisher but people are getting paid to do the work that is usually done for free in an open-access model. Unless I’m missing something, doesn’t the print journal arrangement exist to pay people for their work in publishing the journal? And doesn’t this kind of work, copy-editing and inviting reviewers etc., fall to postgraduate students or sessional academics and is typically unpaid – as my experience working on an open-access journal was?

As regards MDPI, some of the comments here explain a weird situation where the journal Religions approached me for a review but wanted it done in a super short time frame (like a week) and I checked out the journal online and it seemed legit so I agreed to the review but said I’d need at least 3 weeks. They then wrote and said they had already asked several reviewers and they had agreed to the original timeframe. When I asked why they had invited more reviewers than needed, as this sounded like they were shotgunning reviewers, they gave some really weird response. I guess there model is super-fast publication but I can’t see how they would secure reviewers that fast and with such a short turnaround for completed reviews.

Kind regards,

Holly.

The whole concept of predatory or fake publishing is completely bogus. Ditto for the notion of “legitimate publishing.” These terms have meaning only for those scholars who have uncritically internalized the professional norms of twenty-first century academia, i.e. what counts in terms of scholarly achievement is publication in “selective” outlets irrespective of actual substantive content. (As every journal reader knows, any consistently positive correlation between selectivity and quality is hard to discern). This insistence on "reputability" intensifies the debasement of academic judgment by substituting the purely contingent for the essential. It also, by the way, endows commercial, corporate, profit-oriented publishing with an aura that it emphatically does not deserve. The way of the future for serious scholars with a genuine interest in intellectual work lies in open-access publishing, and screw all the mystification about “prestige” publishing houses. And if you want your paper to be peer-reviewed, send it to your peers. 

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