The foundational pillars of the Internet have been under attack from many different sources. Tim Burner’s Lee never wanted his creation to create divisions between people, to spread false information, to invade privacy, or to charge for access to public services. Yet each of these has grown just as much as the Internet has into some of the most pressing issues of our human society. The Internet revolutionized the world, especially the free spread of information, so it was a natural progression for academic journals to take advantage of the technology. But instead of embracing the opportunity to leverage the accessibility and reach of the Internet, publishing corporations are exploiting this to generate more profits. This manipulation and restriction of research is the reason why open access journals are necessary today.
I looked into one open-access journal within Computer Science, the Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences (HCIS) journal. It is one of the two journals made by the Korea Information Processing Society – Computer Software Research Group (KIPS-CSWRG), an international non-profit scientific organization based in Korea. Both the HCIS journal and the KIPS-CSWRG organization are compromised of university faculty from around the world, with a small majority of them from Korea or the USA. The journal covers and publishes an extremely wide range of Computer Science articles that usually have a direct interdisciplinary use or application. To review a submission, HCIS charges a £755/$1180/€960 article processing fee, which can be waived or discounted for authors in low-income countries or on a case-by-case basis. I have not been able to find the reason behind the current $200+ difference of value between using certain currencies other than the currency rates used at the time these prices were set.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has indexed and awarded the DOAJ seal to the HCIS journal, which sets it as “outstanding best practice” in terms of open access practices. This includes a Creative Commons license that allows the reuse and remixing of content, as well as gives the author copyright without restriction. However, the HCIS journal is published by SpringerOpen, the open access wing of the publishing giant, Springer. This concerns me because Springer is avidly a for-profit publishing corporation. The Editor-in-Chief of the HCIS journal and Vice-President of the KIPS-CSWRG organization, Professor James J. (Jong Hyuk) Park, says:
“… we have considered how best to publish leading research work that is accessible to the widest possible audience. … we have signed an agreement with Springer to publish HCIS as an open access journal starting in mid-2011. Our journal will benefit from Springer’s wide distribution channels and academic publishing expertise”
An open access department within a for-profit company should be celebrated, but carefully watched. They can be a great ally in the push for more open and available research publications, but may try to directly compete with independent non-profit open access publishers over receiving the article processing fee. So by increasing the number of open access journals, a for-profit publisher could starve a non-profit publisher of publications. The 200+ journals of OpenSpringer could be trying to achieve this. Then, when only a small number of for-profit publishers gain absolute control over the publishing market, they are able to remove open access publication opportunities in the future. This is the core of my biggest reservation of publishing in HCIS: the unclear relationship between Springer, OpenSpringer, KIPS-CSWRG organization, and the HCIS journal. There is no clear description of how the article processing fee is being used, specifically which entities it goes to. I think that this transparency would help the HCIS journal, and many others like it, to be more trusted. But I do agree with them in that open access should remain a primary goal of academic publication, and that why I would publish with them given the chance.