From: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2019 2:34 AM
To: Arlo Griffiths
Cc: indology@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:

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@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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