Is This Journal Legit? Open Access and Predatory Publishers

Andrew Wilner, MD, interviews the editor in chief of the Neurology journals, Jose Merino, MD, on open-access publishing and the dangers of predatory journals.
www.staging.me...
-TRANSCRIPT-
Andrew N. Wilner, MD: Welcome to Medscape. I'm Dr Andrew Wilner, and my guest today is Dr Jose Merino. Dr Merino is editor in chief of the Neurology family of journals and professor of neurology and co-vice chair of education at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
Our program today is a follow-up of Dr Merino's presentation at the recent American Academy of Neurology meeting in Denver, Colorado. Along with two other panelists, Dr Merino discussed the role of open-access publication and the dangers of predatory journals.
Dr Merino, welcome to Medscape.
Jose G. Merino, MD, MPhil: Thank you for having me here. It's a pleasure.
Open Access Defined
Wilner: I remember when publication in neurology was pretty straightforward. It was either the green journal or the blue journal, but things have certainly changed. I think one topic that is not clear to everyone is this concept of open access. Could you define that for us?
Merino: Sure. Open access is a mode of publication that fosters more open or accessible science. The idea of open access is that it combines two main elements. One is that the papers that are published become immediately available to anybody with an internet connection anywhere in the world without any restrictions.
The second important element from open access, which makes it different from other models we can talk about, is the fact that the authors retain the copyright of their work, but they give the journal and readers a license to use, reproduce, and modify the content.
This is different, for example, from instances where we have funder mandates. For example, NIH papers have to become available 6 months after publication, so they're available to everybody but not immediately.
Then copyright is retained, in the case of NIH employees, for example, by the government or by the journals themselves. The two elements of open access, I think, are immediate access to the material and the fact that it's published with a Creative Commons license.
Wilner: I remember that when a journal article was published, say, in Neurology, if you didn't have a subscription to Neurology, you went to the library that hopefully had a subscription to Neurology.
If they didn't have it, you would write to the author and say, "Hey, I heard you have this great paper because the abstract was out there. Could you send me a reprint?" Has that whole universe evaporated?
Merino: It depends on how the paper is published. For example, in Neurology, some of the research we publish is open access. Basically, if you have an internet connection, you can access the paper.
That's the case for papers published in our wholly open-access journals in the Neurology family like Neurology Neuroimmunology & Neuroinflammation, Neurology Genetics, or Neurology Education.
For other papers that are published in Neurology, not under open access, there is a paywall. For some of them, the paywall comes down after a few months based on funder mandates and so on. As I was mentioning, the NIH-funded papers are available 6 months later.
In the first 6 months, you may have to go to your library, and if your library has a subscription, you can download it directly. [This is also true for] those that always stay behind the paywall, where you have to have a subscription or your library has to have a subscription.
Is Pay to Publish a Red Flag?
Wilner: I'm a professional writer. With any luck, when I write something, I get paid to write it. There's been a long tradition in academic medicine that when you submit an article to, say, Neurology, you don't get paid as an author for the publication. Your reward is the honor of it being published.
Neurology supports itself in various ways, including advertising and so on. That's been the contract: free publication for work that merits it, and the journal survives on its own.
With open access, one of the things that's happened is that - and I've published open access myself - is that I get a notification that I need to pay to have my article that I've slaved over published. Explain that, please.
Merino: This is the issue with open access. As I mentioned, the paper gets published. You're giving the journal a license to publish it. You're retaining the copyright of your work. That means that the journal cannot make money or support itself by just publishing open access because they belong to you.
Transcript in its entirety can be found by clicking here: www.staging.me...