Open Access Publishing Bogeymen

[Richard Poynder]

In their efforts to derail the onward march of Open Access (OA) opponents have conjured up a number of bogeymen about Open Access publishing. First, they maintain, asking authors to pay to publish could turn scholarly publishing into a vanity press.Second, they say, OA publishing will in any case inevitably lead to lax or even non-existent peer review. Third, they argue, OA publishing is not financially sustainable. I felt the breath of all three bogeymen on the back of my neck recently, as I conducted an email interview with the CEO of OA publisher Sciyo, Aleksandar Lazinica — an interview that led the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) to ask Sciyo to remove OASPA's logo from its web site.
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