[INDOLOGY] question about a soliciation from publisher MDPI

Tue Mar 26 05:57:34 UTC 2019

Thank you Dominik, and thanks to other who have answered on the list or privately.

Dominik: why limit yourself to British examples and deny my claim that there are journals that are both "fine" and "impose very low barriers to access"? In my opinion, the way ZDMG and French journals like BEFEO and Arts Asiatiques make their content available through entirely unrestricted public services (respectively MENADOC and PERSEE) is a nice example, notwithstanding some flaws in execution among which some years of backlog, and I don't understand why you choose to ignore it. All of the mentioned journals also deposit on JSTOR, in the two French cases with a delay of one year after paper publication. I realize that JSTOR is not universally accessible without fee, but it is to many in our field and in that sense the barrier is still rather low. Should we agree on this point, then JAOS (whose contents immediately become available on JSTOR) would become another good example of the kind of journals I was alluding to. If I am not mistaken, publishing in those journals will satisfy the current directives of the European Research Council on open access to publicly funded research, and has the advantage of costing nothing to scholar and reader alike.

Perhaps superfluously: these words in favor of some old school journals don't mean that I appreciate any less the wonderful work that is being done by you and others for opening pathways to open access publication in natively online journals that still maintain the highest standards of quality control on contents and layout and do so for free.

Best wishes,

Arlo Griffiths

________________________________
From: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2019 2:34 AM
To: Arlo Griffiths
Cc: indology at list.indology.info
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] question about a soliciation from publisher MDPI

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<https://cikitsa.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-open-is-open-access.html>
  *   Business models for OA journals<https://cikitsa.blogspot.com/2013/01/business-models-for-open-access-journals.html>
  *   Crowd-sourcing peer-review<https://cikitsa.blogspot.com/2016/10/crowd-sourcing-peer-review.html#>
  *   What's the point of an academic journal?<https://cikitsa.blogspot.com/2016/09/notes-on-what-modern-journal-has-to.html>

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<https://youtu.be/L5rVH1KGBCY>.  For more literature on the issues at stake, the DOAJ.org<http://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<http://ualberta.academia.edu/DominikWujastyk>
,

Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity
,

Department of History and Classics<http://historyandclassics.ualberta.ca/>
,
University of Alberta, Canada
.

South Asia at the U of A:

sas.ualberta.ca<http://sas.ualberta.ca/>

On Fri, 22 Mar 2019 at 23:50, Arlo Griffiths via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info<mailto:indology at list.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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