[INDOLOGY] [#2] Re: question about a soliciation from publisher MDPI

Mon Mar 25 04:28:15 UTC 2019

[Repost -- My previous HTML reply seems to have had trouble.]

This may also be of interest:

UC terminates subscriptions with world’s largest scientific publisher
in push for open access to publicly funded research

UC Office of the President
Thursday, February 28, 2019

https://bit.ly/2IGVfLf

or the original:

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-terminates-subscri
ptions-worlds-largest-scientific-publisher-push-open-access-publicly

Best,
 Richard

-- 
Richard Mahoney | Indica et Buddhica

Littledene  Bay Road  Oxford  NZ 
T: +6433121699  M: +64210640216 
r.mahoney at indica-et-buddhica.org 

http://indica-et-buddhica.org/ 

-----Original Message-----
From: Dominik Wujastyk via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info>
Reply-to: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com>
To: Arlo Griffiths <arlogriffiths at hotmail.com>
Cc: indology at list.indology.info <indology at list.indology.info>
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] question about a soliciation from publisher
MDPI
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2019 20:34:28 -0600

I have written about this kind of topic quite a bit on my blog, over
the years.  I am afraid I must ask you to search it by keyword
("journal", "copyright", "open access" etc.).  Opinion pieces include:
How open is open-access
Business models for OA journals
Crowd-sourcing peer-review
What's the point of an academic journal?
To answer your question, I've twice published articles where an
processing fee was required for OA publication.  Brill charged €400, if
I recall, for an article in Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity. 
Springer charged £2000 or £3000 (I can't recall) for an OA paper in the
International Journal of Hindu Studies.  At that time, these fees were
paid by my employer, who had a budget for this.  My research contract
included a clause saying that all my publications had to be Open
Access. 

There are many reasons why OA is a good thing.  A short statement of
the main issues is available in this video.  For more literature on the
issues at stake, the DOAJ.org hosts a lot of documentation and
discussion.

You say, "there are still fine journals which don't ask any such fees
and impose very low barriers to access."  This is not the case,
unfortunately.  Yes, they may be free for authors, but the many South
Asia-related journals that have been vacuumed up by Cambridge
University Press (JRAS, BSOAS, etc.) are very expensive indeed for
readers whose universities don't pay exorbitant annual license fees. 
The video above makes some of these points about half way through.

Best,
Dominik

--
Professor Dominik Wujastyk,
Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity,
Department of History and Classics,
University of Alberta, Canada.
South Asia at the U of A: sas.ualberta.ca

On Fri, 22 Mar 2019 at 23:50, Arlo Griffiths via INDOLOGY <indology at lis
t.indology.info> wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
> 
> I had received a few weeks ago an offer (see below) to help a
> commercial company called MDPI that publishes an Open Access journal
> Religions as guest editor for a special issue on an Indological
> topic. Since I had never heard of publisher nor journal; since I
> suspected that this is one of those predatory publishers we read
> about a lot nowadays; and since as a matter of principle I favor
> publishing in established not-for-profit journals, I decided not to
> respond. Now the same publisher sends me a gentle reminder,
> apparently showing that at least it's not a mere machine which has
> decided to solicit my assistance. This time I did click on one of
> their links and now see that authors wishing to publish in the
> journal Religions need to pay an amount of 550 CHF in 'Article
> Processing Charges' (APC); I don't know whether editors receive any
> payment for their work, but since no mention of such payment has been
> made I expect there is none.
> 
> I am curious whether others have received such offers, and whether
> there might be reason not to be as negatively prejudiced as I am.
> More generally, I wonder how many of you have actually published work
> and paid APC to get your work published. I have never been asked to
> do so, and wonder why anyone might feel compelled to do so as long as
> there are still fine journals which don't ask any such fees and
> impose very low barriers to access.
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> Arlo Griffiths
> EFEO, Paris
> 
> ---- QUOTE FROM EMAIL RECEIVED
> 
> Dear Professor Griffiths,
> 
> We invite you to join us as Guest Editor for the open access journal
> Religions (ISSN 2077-1444), to establish a Special Issue. Our
> suggested topic is ‘Exploring Hindu and Buddhist religious literature
> in Sanskrit’. You have been invited based on your strong publication
> record in this area, and we hope to work with you to establish a
> collection of papers that will be of interest to scholars in the
> field. Please click on the following link to either accept or decline
> our request:
> https://susy.mdpi.com/guest_editor/invitation/process/282259/6TEH3ZRG
> 
> As Guest Editor, we would ask you to define the aim and scope of the
> Special Issue, assist in inviting contributions, be the final
> decision-maker for articles after peer-review, and collaborate with
> our editorial team at MDPI.
> 
> The editorial office will take care of setting up the Special Issue
> website, arranging for promotional material, assisting with
> invitations to contribute papers, and administrative tasks associated
> with peer-review, including inviting reviewers, collating reports,
> contacting authors, and professional production before publication.
> 
> RELIGIONS is an international, open-access scholarly journal,
> publishing peer reviewed studies of religious thought and practice.
> It is indexed in A&HCI (Web of Science), ATLA Religion Database and
> in SCOPUS, which gave it a Citescore of 0.58 and listed it among the
> top 7% of the 389 religious studies journals SCOPUS surveyed in 2017.
> Our PDF downloads per month = 72,796+/-.
> 
> At http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special_issues, you may
> access an inventory of our special topics issues:
> 
> Religion and Violence (editor, John Esposito, Georgetown, Washington
> DC) Religion and Refugees (editors, Jin-Heong Jung, Frei Universitat,
> Berlin and Alexander Horstmann, Tallinn University, Estonia)
> Comparative Theology (editors, Francis Clooney, Harvard University
> and John Berthrong, Boston University) Christianity in China in the
> Twenty First Century (editor, Mark Toulouse, University of Toronto)
> Measures of Spirituality (editor, Arndt Bussing, Witten/Herdecke
> University, Germany) Transcendentalism and Religious Experience
> (editors, Kenneth S. Sacks, Brown University and Daniel Koch, Oxford
> University) The Society for Tantric Studies Proceedings (2016)
> (editor, Glen A. Hayes, Bloomfield College and Sthaneshwar Timalsina,
> San Diego State University)
> 
> Please feel free to contact us if you are interested and would like
> further details, or have any questions.
> 
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