John Wiley & Sons Inc., the Hoboken-based educational publishing company, is paying $298 million for Hindawi Ltd., an open-access publishing company specializing in scientific research publishing, it announced Tuesday.
The acquisition will help Wiley increase its position as a global
leader in research, it said in a news release, giving it a company
focused on the rapidly growing OA scholarly publishing model. The
London-based company has a portfolio of more than 200 peer-reviewed
journals, Wiley said.
“The acquisition of Hindawi enables Wiley to move farther and faster
toward our goal of meeting the world’s urgent and escalating need for
new knowledge,” Brian Napack, Wiley’s CEO and president, said in a
prepared statement. “Hindawi is a true pioneer in the industry,
empowering researchers with a fully digital, user-friendly publishing
process that gets their life-changing, peer-reviewed discoveries out
into the world faster and more efficiently.”
Wiley said Hindawi is projected to generate approximately $40 million
in revenue for fiscal 2020, with year-over-year growth of 50%. The
acquisition will double Wiley’s OA journal portfolio, potentially
increasing author retention and strengthening its position in the
sector, particularly in the fast-growing China market.
One New Year’s Day, the government of
India released the bold and ambitious draft Science, Technology and
Innovation Policy (STIP) to the public for comments.
The policy aims to bring about
changes in the research ecosystem of India by encouraging innovation to
make the Indian science and technology ecosystem one that can survive
global competition.
As part of such an endeavour, the
government proposed a ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ plan which would
make thousands of journals freely available to Indians.
One Nation, One Subscription
According to the policy draft, “The Government of India will negotiate with journal publishers
for a “one nation, one subscription” policy whereby, in return for one
centrally negotiated payment, all individuals in India will have access
to journal articles. This will replace individual institutional journal subscriptions.”
It is estimated that Indian research institutes spend nearly 15 billion
rupees on subscriptions to paywalled journals and articles alone.
Through the policy, the government of India intends to become the
largest country to give free access to content behind paywalls to such a
large population.
There are nearly 3000-4000
high-impact journals, the ones which are influential and prestigious in
their respective fields, that the government would need to get
subscriptions to. Such a bulk-subscription is estimated to cost the
government several hundred crores every year on subscription fees.
Such a plan might sound a little too
bold but it could dramatically increase access to quality research to
Indian scientists and researchers who have had to deal with exorbitant
fees to get access to research in their fields.
Barely 5 companies – Reed-Elsevier,
Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer and Sage – control
nearly 50% of all academic publishing. The costs for subscriptions to
these journals is often too much for researchers from developing
countries like India where funding for research is scarce.
Will The Publishers Agree?
The policy is a proposal as of yet.
Even if it gets approved by the cabinet, that still leaves us with the
most treacherous step of them all- negotiating with the publishers.
If successful, India can be a shining example to the world. “If India could do it, and make it cheaper, many countries will be interested,” said Peter Suber, the director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication.
Barely 5 companies control nearly 50% of all academic publishing
“The overall goal is the democratisation of knowledge,” said Dr Ashutosh Sharma, secretary, science and technology ministry.
Existing Resource Pooling Platforms
To make scholarly content available
more freely to Indians, there already exist consortiums, two or more
libraries pooling their resources together.
eShodhSindhu, CSIR E-Journals, MCIT,
ISRO Antariksh Gyaan Consortium are some centrally funded shared
libraries that are currently available. However, these resources are not
freely available to every citizen or individual researcher who might
need access to resources.
Through pursuing ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ the government has nothing to lose and everything to gain.
In 2019, India was the world’s third-largest producer of scientific articles.
By going to the negotiating table
with a tremendous number of subscriptions and the weight of the large
number of articles produced by our researchers, India can help secure
open access to countless paywalled content that has been out of reach
for not just individual researchers but also researchers and scientists
from smaller institutes that cannot possibly afford to pay the
exorbitant fees charged by high-impact journals.
In developing countries like India funding for research is scarce
The policy is part of the
government’s attempts for an “Atmanirbhar Bharat”. In addition to making
journals available freely, the policy also aimed to make all
public-funded research to be available freely in a national database. By
promoting open access, the government hopes to “fosters more equitable participation in science”.
The December 2020 Scopus discontinued journal update is located
here. On this list the reader will find many OMICS and WSEAS journals
[260], as well as journals from other publishers you might not expect, such as
Elsevier and Inderscience. Remember, just because a journal is listed with a
top tier publisher does not mean they are Scopus indexed or not on an old Beall list.
Many students are also shocked to find out
that there is a Scopus journal discontinued list [260], similar in some ways to
what Jeffrey Beall was attempting to do with his predatory publishing lists before he deleted then in January 2017. We also noted the removal of 12 WSEAS titles from
the Scopus index in December 2020 for ‘publication concerns’. This is a
screen capture of the WSEAS titles from the previous October 2020 Scopus
spreadsheet:
Some readers might also be interested to know that
journals/conferences can be re-considered after their removal by Scopus. From
our research, we think this can happen as soon as one year from their initial
removal by their re-evaluation
by the Scopus Content Selection &
Advisory Board (CSAB) [275]. Some might also want to
know what ‘Radar’ is on the Scopus discontinued list. Simply stated, Radar is a
tool which began in 2017 by which Scopus identifies and filters out ‘outlier journals’. Outlier journals are journals indexed in Scopus which show outlier behavior
and rapid, unexplainable changes in behavior. Red flags are stated by Scopus to
include
1) Total article output and sudden
article output growth,
2) Shift in geographical diversity
among authors and editors, and
3) Shift in received citations and
percentage of self-citations [275].
Therefore, these red flags may point to the beginning of
malpractice and their subsequent removal. In Radar's first analysis for 2016/2017, Scopus flagged 509
titles for re-evaluation. Of these, 312 were discontinued from Scopus, which
represented a 61% discontinuation rate.
Moreover, it is our observation that this Scopus’ aggressive
journal removal process coincided with the Beall Lists’ demise. Jeffrey Beall
deleted his lists in January 2017, which is the same year that Scopus launched
Radar [275]. Was this the last and final coincidence between the big publishers and
Beall?
Our final comments in all this concerns a journal’s metric and
Radar analysis once they become Scopus indexed. Does the Radar tool take into
account that by Scopus inclusion, the journal’s value has increased exponentially?
As such, there is always a deluge of papers, the addition or significant increase
in the journal’s APC, the number of papers per issue, and an increase of global paper submissions. Does Radar have a component for good business sense and profit? Or is that left only for the biggest publisher, Elsevier (in 2019
Elsevier had 2,500 academic journals bringing in $3.414 billion in earnings
[141]), and their own tool, Scopus Radar, to eliminate potential competition?
It is also interesting to note that there is zero mention of
the word ‘predatory’ as a criteria for journal removal from Scopus. Nor is
there any mention about there being a criteria of lax review. No, the removal
criteria seems to be entirely focused on a potential competitor growing too
quickly (and making too much money). Monopolies and cartels are good,
competition is bad. Once again, being the police (index inclusion/Beall lists),
the judge (SJR/Scopus databases), and the jury (RADAR/CSAB) is what makes
cartels and monopolies work.
Finally, the following screen capture is from a very
interesting study authored in July 2019 concerning Scopus discontinued
journals [260]:
