Open Access Week/Break the norm – healthy open research practices podcast

Introduction: Emerald Podcast series. Research that makes a difference.

Iram Satti: In this episode, we speak with Professor Payal Kumar and Professor Jayantha Dewasiri about open access journals in celebration of open access week 2021. With a drive to hear underrepresented voices from outside of the US and the UK, we begin to understand the open access culture within the South Asian region. Looking at the broad theme of open access, is the academy ready for a cultural shift? We're now aware that more than ever, there is a need for research to become more easily discoverable and accessible. Here we discuss issues around our researchers and publishers collectively doing enough to support open research future, inclusivity and equity, and the regional differences in relation to open access. I hope you'll enjoy this conversation.

Hi Payal and Jayantha! Firstly, thank you for joining me today for this conversation about open access. You're both really engaged in this space and the community, so I think we'll have a lot of insight from you for Open Access week. But would you both be able to introduce yourselves to our listeners? So Payal if you want to go first?

Dr. Payal Kumar: Sure, thank you Iram for inviting us, really appreciate it. So I'm Dr. Payal Kumar, I was in this corporate sector for 25 years. My last position was as Vice President Editorial and Production at Sage Publications, where I was for six years. So one of my teams was looking after the production of 120 books and the other team was looking after 68 journals. Today I'm an academic I'm Dean of Research and Management Studies at Indian School of Hospitality, Gurugram, India, and I'm on the editorial board of several journals. You know, I deal with a lot of reviewing, as you can imagine, you know, peer review articles and things like that, and I'm very happy to be on this podcast.

IS: Brilliant thank you, Payal. Jayantha, are you happy to share a bit about yourself?

Dr. Dewasiri N. Jayantha: Thank you very much Iram inviting us in order to participate for this podcast. I am Jayantha Dewasiri, I'm working as the Professor attached to the Department of Accountancy and Finance at the Safaricom University of Sri Lanka. I am also from the corporate sector itself. I do have 17 years of experience in the industry along with seven years of academic experience. Currently, I'm working as the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the South Asian Journal of Marketing, published by Emerald Publishing, and also I'm working as a Brand Ambassador for Emerald for its South Asian region.

IS: Brilliant, thank you both, and again, thank you for joining us today. So let's get straight into open access. So it would be really interesting to hear your thoughts on, you know, the different perspectives of people who engage with Open access. So. whether they're researchers, publishers, and what are the different challenges and barriers faced? And what do you think publishers can do to try and alleviate some of these barriers?

PK: So if I can go first, I feel that still a lot of sensitization has to be done as to exactly what is the open access movement because there is a lot of confusion about this, thanks to the you know, upcoming predatory journals around the world who say that they are open access, take a lot of money from you, and then just produce your paper by just converting it to a simple PDF, without any kind of peer review or stringent, you know, academic measures. So due to so many predatory journals being out there, it gives a kind of a wrong impression I feel of open access journals, and there are a number of bona fide open access journals out there, which do have a proper, you know, peer review measures. So I think this seems to be confusion at times a lot of doctoral scholars ask me, you know, should I get published in this kind of open access journal or not? They're quite unsure about this. So while it's a wonderful movement, you know, that, theoretically speaking, we should be able to put out our research out there for everybody to access, but the reality is that there is hesitancy and I think what can publishers do about it? I mean, they would have to have more perhaps workshops and sensitize early career scholars that there are some good open access journals out there, which they can definitely try and get published in.

DNJ: In addition to what Dr. Payal said, there are some barriers such as substandard quality of manuscripts. The issue I would like to highlight here is what make editors accept low quality manuscript. I can see there are two significant incentives behind the same. For instance, journals need to publish their issues at a specified interval for the existence. Hence, if most of the manuscripts are substandard, the editors may proceed with some of those in order to maintain the journal. So here, as publishers, what we can do is we can strengthen the editorial and peer review process in order to maintain the quality of the manuscript in order to focus more on quality than the quantity. So that should be the way forward. In addition to that, it is basically necessary to have some kind of financial assistance in order to establish and maintain these journals. So it should be either paid by authors, readers or institutions. If you think about diamond open access or platinum open access, so it is paid by institutions. Hence, we can assume that most open access journals have inherent weaknesses of incentives for such publications. Here, what I suggest is that publishers can change their model to a platinum open access model with the support of the industry and academia to position themselves as reputable outlets that do not charge from both readers and authors. Accordingly, you can remove inherent incentive from the publishing process if you take the industry. So we can see that industry people they are engaging in developing journals with the support of academia and also the publishers. So I see that as a gap, we need to overcome this, because if you take with research from research, who are the beneficiaries, beneficiaries are normally the society as well as the industry. So industry people, they are benefited from research. So they do have a responsibility in order to develop a main infrastructure with regard to the research and development.

PK: So I agree with Dr. Jayantha that monetarily, this could be a deterrent factor for somebody to publish an open access. And I believe that, again, sensitization programme need to be out there to explain the different financial model of open access journals. So traditional journal publishing is about the institutions being the subscriber and they pay for it right? And then there are many readers who log in and then they can access to journals. Now in open access, the finances are kind of turned on its head and who pays for it, it has to be paid by the professor or the doctoral scholar who wants to get the paper published. Now where does that money come from? It comes usually from the universities, but that's kind of an assumption could be very much there in the global north, but in the global south, you know, not every university has enough funds to give to every scholar to go and get published. So I think there needs to be, you know, some financial consideration, perhaps for developing countries, scholars, they can't be because nobody's going to just, you know, pay $200 from their own pocket to get a paper published, or whatever the price may be.

IS: Yeah, no, I completely hear that. I think, you know, one of the previous conversations that we've had Payal is about funders and those who fund academic research. And I know, obviously, from a global north perspective that there can be funding available for open access and publications. Is that the case? Or is that not the case in the global south?

PK: Now, so it's not always the case, that's the point I'm trying to get to. So there are some good universities, which provide what we call a PDA or Professional Development Allowance to each professor, depending on your rank, you know. So when that money you can either go to an international conference, or you can, you know, pay for your open access journal, it's up to you as a scholar how you want to spend that fund, but not everybody, you know, like, let's say there's some universities which don't have that much grants or whatever available to them. So one can't assume that every professor inside India gets a PDA, you know, so I think that's a kind of a false assumption of publishers perhaps. So, they may want to look at different pricing models depending on which part of the world you're from.

DNJ: But if you consider about the South Asian region again, so India, they do have a lot of funding capabilities inside the country, there are a lot of avenues, but if you consider about other countries in the South Asian region, like Afghanistan and Maldives, they do not have at all. Other countries such as Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, have moderate kind of I mean, access to these grants. So that is regional inequality we are we can see with the special reference to this grant availability as well.

IS: That's really interesting, I didn't know about that. So that's incredibly interesting to know. Just moving on to sort of the next question, what are your thoughts on researchers and academics being reliant on Open Access research? Do you think there is a reliance there? And again, what's the difference between different regions? You know, are there some academics in some regions that really do rely on Open Access?

PK: So I wouldn't use the word rely, I mean, we definitely access journals, which are, you know, papers, which are an open access or not an open access. So we go, according to whatever paper we think is important for our research, isn't it? So we look at the quality of the paper and is it fitting into the research that we want to do? The other thing that we which perhaps open access publishers need to look at is that obviously, this is a fairly new movement, and so there are many old journals and very reputed journals, quality journals out there in which authors have been cited extensively throughout the years, who therefore have a very large impact factor, and obviously, every scholar wants to get published in such journals or wants to cite such journals, you know, so read papers of High Impact Factor journals. So you know, they're open access is kind of a Matthew effect, you know, like, open access journals possibly haven't got that, too much like High Impact Factor journals, because you need a certain amount of time to have gone by, and several academics to have been cited over a considerable number of years, do you get me? So quality and impact factor is definitely one thing. But if I take my example, say, I'm doing a literature review, so I have to look at several papers in my area, I would do a keyword search and I would you know, obviously, if a paper comes to my attention, which is an open access journal, it won't be either a deterrent or parrot to know that I should go for this, it will basically be what is the quality of the paper that I would be looking at as a researcher? Is it a good paper? Is it contributing some new knowledge? Can I use it for my research?

DNJ: Yeah, I also do agree with what Dr. Payal is stating. To emphasize more, I would like to highlight that we are living in a global society. Nowadays, ubiquity is more important than anything. So similarly, the readers basically, they should have access to the research anywhere, anytime. But, there is as I stated earlier, there is a regional inequality within the region itself in the South Asian region itself. Where I mean access to subscription-based databases, where we can see in India they can have access, but in other countries like Afghanistan, in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, there is a limited access to these databases, since that is based on subscription base. So if you compare with the developed world, most research institutions and universities do not have access to the well-known databases in the South Asia region. This just because of these subscription fees. They are for the researchers who are living in the developing countries, they have to sometime rely on open access models, especially during the pandemic situation, they do not have the remote access. So now basically, I am delighted to see that most publishers and research entities now develop open access model in order to reduce these regional inequities, while enhancing diversity and inclusion in the research.

IS: Now that's really insightful. Thank you, Jayantha. So we've touched on this a little bit already, when we've talked about predatory journals, but I am thinking, you know, and again, Payal you've mentioned this, that open access can feel very idealistic, but there is a dark side to it with predatory journals. So I'm just wondering, Have either of you got really tangible advice for early career researchers, especially on how to navigate this? What tips do you have, and how do we educate academics about the dark side of open access?

PK: Yeah, well, I do a lot of workshops around the country for I've done it for about 3000 doctoral scholars up to now in academic writing. So I do bring up these issues, and I say things like, you know, it started off as a very idealistic movement in an American University where some local people, they were funding some research in this university and they wanted to have a look at the article, but then they realized there was a paywall, and that they would have to pay for that article which they had funded, and therefore this element this is ridiculous. So why shouldn't it be open the accessible to everybody? So, it's started off as a wonderful movement that you know, knowledge should be out there open for everybody because say you're a scholar in a developing country, and you don't have access to certain you know journals just because the payment is very high and your subscription model is high and your university can't afford that, then you're already on the backfoot. Because the very first thing you do when you do research is what we call a literature review, which leads to your research gap finding, isn't it? And if you don't have enough literature to review, then already, you're on shaky grounds. So what can young scholars do? they need to be cognizant, they need to be a little bit wary. So if they get an email saying, you know, pay us X amount of dollars, and we'll publish your paper in two-days time, and it’ll be out there on the net, I'd be very suspect about this, you know, it has suspicions about this. This is more likely to be a predatory journal, you know, although open access and so one would have to look and possibly go with good publishing models. So for example, Emerald, for example, Wiley, for example, say Sage, if you know it's a good publishing house, then what happens is that you know that they will have a double-blind peer review that will have a proper process and have an editorial team looking at your article to make sure it is of academic caliber, right? And ultimately, our reputation for academics is our currency. So you don't want to by mistake, get published in a predatory journal, and then, you know, it kind of tarnishes your image, doesn't it? So one has to be cognizant that there are predatory journals out there, our University Grants Commission of India has come up with a list of what they see as bona fide journals, and then they have also mentioned journals, which you should not get published in, you know. So even governments are becoming cognizant about this, but we need to be individually aware as far as possible, I would imagine.

DNJ: Yeah. In addition to what Dr. Payal said, as correctly stated, so actually, we were doing so many words. So during the past period, in order to educate our young scholars on these basically clone predatory or fake journals. For instance, we recently concluded a four-month programme on writing impactful research in collaboration with a mirror to that we educated thousands of researchers on avoiding predatory clone of fake journals. Actually, Iram you are asking for a tangible theme. How do we educate early career researchers about this? What tips and advice we can provide? So I would like to give you a tangible thing here. I recommend a step simple plan for researchers to steer clear of predatory journals that involves basically doing your homework. Do your homework to ensure the journal and publishers credibility, to distinguish legitimate from predatory journals, here are some valuable sources of information there are. Basically first you have to check whether the journal or publisher is listed in Dale's list. Dales list that list all the predatory journals, we can go to the list and we can see whether the journal is listed in the bills list. Second, check if the journal is a member of the Directory of Open Access journal that is DOAJ. So in addition to that, we can check with COPAY, OASPA or STM. If the journals claim that it is open access, it should be listed on such databases Iram and if not, you can avoid that journal. Thirdly, if the journal has claimed that it is indexed, what you have to do? You should not rely upon what they say you have to check with search indexing databases, whether it is actually indexed or not. You can check it from the Scopus ABTC Web of Science a ABC and so on. Fourth, I would like to highlight that you can check me the other journalists following ethical practices, basically, including good governance . Here you can check journals contact information, whether the email is correct website, the URL is correct, research the editorial board. Take a look at their peer review process, publication timeline, turnaround period, if the turnaround period is five to 10 days, so there is an issue with regard to the journal. So in addition to that, you have to check on the APC charge, Article Processing Charge. So basically here, the APC process should be separated from the editorial process. If it is not separated, that is a kind of a signal of a predatory journal. I believe that by following these steps, you can avoid predatory journals. I suggest that the decision to submit should be based upon extensive discussions with your co-authors and also experts on the field.

PK: Basically summarized and to add to that. In general, I tell my doctoral scholars that you need to spend time searching a journal anyway you know, I mean, what happens is very often, you know early career Scholars they spend you know a year or two on their actual research and they just send it to a journal which the article doesn't even really fit into that aims and scope and then it gets rejected. So you know, in general never mind predatory journals in general one needs to spend some time researching what is the exact journal that your paper should go into. As a matter of habit, you know, a good habit should I say, and by doing that there's also candles directory you can look at, you know how many times a journal is published a year, who's on the editorial board and all the parts that Dr. Jayantha was saying. So we need to be cognizant of that. There's just one more point Iram about the dark side of open access, which you may not be very happy to hear about as you are a publisher, but I’ll mention it anyway. So that's that, whether it's the traditional subscription model, or whether it's the open access model, you know, publishers really earn a huge amount, and now that we've gone to open access, which means that you're not really producing a print journal isn’t it, a print journal cost a lot of money to actually produce, so your costs have gone down, you know, so maybe I don't know if I'm just going to agree to this, but maybe one should look at subsidizing one should look at just putting the price down simple as that, you know, whether it's a subscription model or the open access model.

IS: You raise a very good point there, Payal, and Jayantha that those steps were, I felt like I needed to write them down even though I'm not a researcher, so thank you for that. Payal I think your comment just then about, you know, the different pricing models, it leads me quite nicely into my last question for this podcast. So, I'm wondering, where do you both see open access in a few years time? And, you know, what would you like to see?

PK: So I mean, I think it's going to keep growing, it's going to keep, the momentum is going to keep up. And then eventually, you will be getting journals with more impact factors in it, which go into that direction, because a certain amount of time would have elapsed, as I said, more citations would have happened for the quality journals, you know. Keep getting better editorial boards, and things like that, that also helps keeping the paper the journals out on time. And if you have a lot more traffic in terms of attracting more better scholars into this, then it is very likely that you can get a good High Impact Factor eventually. So I feel it's a movement, which can't be stopped now, right? It's just going to keep going on and on. But yeah, how are the publishers also going to manage this epidemic of predatory journals, which is threatening the publishers as well, isn't it? It's not just doctoral scholars, which are geteting caught up and confused and not knowing what to do. It's obviously impacting the bona fid journals, too. So I'm hoping that, you know, people will find solutions and when we've managed to find solutions to so many problems in life over the generations so that there should be a solution out there.

IS: No, thank you. Payal. Jayantha, what are your thoughts about the next few years in open access?

DNJ: Frankly Iram, there are limitations in all open access models. But what I firmly believe that is, the Platinum or diamond open access model is the best vehicle amongst the available open access models. The reason is that it is free for both readers and authors. I believe that it is our primary responsibility to establish this kind of free diamond, or we call it at as Platinum open access models. For instance, we recently established an open Platinum access journal called South Asian Journal of Marketing in collaboration with Emerald Publishing in Sri Lanka Institute of marketing along with Safaricom University of Sri Lanka. So this is in order to promote open access culture within the region itself. So, basically as I stated earlier the beneficiaries of research, I repeat it again, that is broadly the society and industry. So as a researcher who has worked for the industry for more than 17 years, I would like to see a different open access model in the future. You ask, what sort of open access model would you like to see? So what will be the future? What would you like to see? So to answer that question, I would like to see a different open access model in the future, where industry, publishers and academic institutions get together to establish or open Platinum access journals that is free for both readers and authors Iram. Here the cost can be incurred by the educational institutions and the industry partners. I believe that the industry partners can give back to the society and research through this model.

PK: I agree with the Dr. Jayantha, but I think ultimately, whether we're talking about open access or non-open access the traditional subscription model, I think ultimately, as scholars we're looking for quality, isn't it? So I don't think it's so much the mode of the you know what shape the journal takes, It's more about quality. So I'm the chief editor of a journal. It's a startup journal, Journal of Business Ethics and Society, and when you start off a journal, it's very difficult to stop because you know, who will publish with you because you don't have impact factor. And then it's chicken and egg, you can’t get Impact Factor until good people publish with you, do you know what I’m saying? Most journals die within the first two years, a huge amount of journals are not able to survive. So my point is, you know, we need to give new journals a chance we need to emphasize quality as academics, we need to have obviously a peer review system. For me, it is all about quality., and the journal has to have quality that that's important, not so much what format it takes, whether it's open access or non-open access, yeah.

DNJ: I also do agree with what Dr. Payal said, quality is very important than the quantity, whether it is open access or not, we have to focus on quality.

IS: Both, Thank you so much for that. I think that was a great session and I feel like I've learned a lot about open access through that. I want to thank you for your time and yeah. Here's to Open Access week.

PK: If I can just say one last thing. It started off as a beautiful fairy tale idealistic movement, and you know, why shouldn’t knowledge be freely available, right? I don't think anybody would argue with that. But you know, the dark side has come which is this predatory journals and people are trying to make a quick buck out of this new open access system. You know, if we could somehow get back to the fairy tale and ensure that good knowledge is out there, get rid of predatory journals which are we're it's a worldwide phenomenon, it's not just particular to one country. And if we're going to encourage young scholars, you know, either through scholarships through funding, as Dr. Jayantha was saying, whether it's from the corporate sector, whether it's from universities, whether it's from the government, but we need to fund new scholars who have different ways of thinking different thoughts, innovative ideas. So that also needs to be encouraged very much, even by publishers, you know?

IS: Thank you Payal. Jayantha have you anything else you’d like to add?

DNJ: Thank you very much Iram for inviting us for this Open Access week in order to give our knowledge and share our knowledge on open access. Thank you very much.

IS: Thank you, thank you everyone.

PK: Thank you so much, thank you. Bye bye.

IS: Thank you for listening to today's episode. You can find the transcript of my conversations on our website, as well as more information about our guests. I'd like to thank Payal Kumar and Jayantha Dewasiri for their help with today's episode, and Alex Youngest from This is Distorted.