Open Access News

Richard Poynder, The Open Access Interviews: Matthew Honan, Open and Shut?  April 23, 2008.  This is another thorough Poynder interview.  It covers Bentham's progress toward the goal of 200 OA journals (178 launched to date), its policy on fee waivers and discounts (for authors from developing countries and for editors), its 90 subscription-based hybrid journals, its "limited OA option" (half of the standard publication fee for just 12 months of OA), the use of CC-BY license in the OA journals, the forthcoming self-archiving policy for Bentham's subscription journals (permitted only after a 12 month embargo), Honan's view of OA mandates from funders and universities, and Honan's responses to criticism of Bentham's practices.  I encourage you to read it all.  If it doesn't give a more complete picture of Bentham, it's not because Richard didn't ask the right questions.  Excerpt:

...Last April [Bentham Science Publishers] announced its intention of launching 300 new Open Access journals by the end of the year. The audacity of this announcement should not be underestimated. After all, it has taken BMC eight years to build up a portfolio of 185 OA journals. And at the time of its announcement, Bentham itself was publishing less than 100 subscription journals. Unsurprisingly, therefore Bentham later reduced the number of new journals it planned to launch to 200....

[I]f Bentham was to achieve its goal it would need to recruit hundreds of researchers to act as chief editors, thousands to sit on the editorial boards of the new journals, and thousands more to submit papers to these journals. Consequently before long a constant stream of email invitations was flowing into the inboxes of researchers around the world.

At first the strategy appeared to be working. After all, being on the editorial board of a scholarly journal is a much-cherished ambition for researchers, and the kudos attached to being a chief editor an even more attractive goal; likewise, their constant hunger to be published means that researchers are always on the lookout for publishing opportunities....

After the first flush of enthusiasm, however, researchers began to question Bentham's activities, not least because many of the invitations they were receiving seemed decidedly badly targeted. For instance, psychologists were being invited to contribute papers on ornithology, health policy researchers were being invited to submit papers on analytical chemistry and economists were being invited to submit papers on sleep research...

To add insult to injury, some of the invitations researchers were receiving were addressed to a completely different person, or the name field was empty, and addressed simply to "Dear Dr.,"...

By March of this year, senior health care research scientist at the University of Toronto Gunther Eysenbach had had enough. Publicly criticising Bentham's activities on his blog, Eysenbach complained..., "All pleas and begging from my side to stop the spamming, as well as clicking on any 'unsubcribe' links did not stop the spam plague from Bentham."

For others, the experience of being targeted by Bentham proved even more frustrating. When Professor John Furedy, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, received an invitation to be editor-in-chief of the Open Behavioral Science Journal he initially accepted. But after doing so he found himself being bombarded with further invitations. And when Bentham failed to reply to the questions he raised about the new role he had taken on he decided the best course of action was to withdraw his acceptance, reluctant to be associated with a company that behaved in this way. Even though he had resigned, however, Furedy was surprised to see that his name had been added to the list of editors on the journal's web site. And despite repeated requests to Bentham to remove it his name remains there to this day.

I too had by now begun receiving copies of Bentham's invitations — not because I was on its mailing list, but because frustrated researchers were forwarding them to me, and asking me to find out what the dickens was going on.

So I emailed various Bentham directors (including Richard Scott and Matthew Honan), all of whom — with the exception of publications director Mahmood Alam — completely ignored my messages. Moreover, while Alam replied, he proved decidedly unwilling to answer my questions, despite repeated promises that he would. He was equally unwilling to put me in contact with anyone else at the company.
I also tried calling the various telephone numbers on the Bentham web site, only to be greeted by voicemail messages. Personally I knew nothing whatsoever about Bentham, so for all I knew it might have been the front for some form of Internet scam.

In the hope of enlightening myself, therefore, I posted a message to a couple of mailing lists....I also began to receive private emails with information about Bentham, including the home phone number of Honan, which was sent to me by a publisher concerned that Bentham would bring the scholarly publishing industry into disrepute.

To his credit, when I called Honan he agreed to speak to me then and there and, with one notable exception, answered all my questions. He was, however, adamant that Bentham is not engaged in any kind of spamming. "The criticisms that you have levelled against the company for spamming are unjustified," he said, adding that by posting my message I had only served to "amplify" a few small errors that the company had made.

Honan also insisted that the company always honours requests to be removed from its mailing list, and added that it is doing no more than any other scholarly publisher....Those researchers who had continued to receive messages after opting had had multiple email addresses, he explained, saying, "We have had very few complaints, and we respond to the complaints that we receive — which are very few in comparison to the number of emails we send out." He did however apologise for any errors that had been made....

"Bentham once enjoyed a reputation as a high-priced reputable scholarly publisher," comments Charles Oppenheim, professor of information science at UK-based Loughborough University, another researcher to be targeted by Bentham.
"In my view, it has damaged that reputation...."

Eysenbach, meanwhile, is less forgiving. Indeed, he is so angry that he is considering suing Bentham under anti-spam laws....

As is now evident, Bentham is not a communicative company. And while it has a presence in four countries — the United Arab Emirates, the Netherlands, Pakistan, and Illinois, USA — in all four jurisdictions the contact point is either a PO Box, or c/o address....

[T]he one thing that Honan refused to tell me is who owns Bentham Science Publishers....

For [Stevan] Harnad there is a clear lesson to be learned. "Let it be an example to Bentham and other publishers that this is not the way to go about starting up journals. It merely gives the publisher, as well as online- and OA-journal publishing, a bad name." ...

Comments

• For more than a year, like Richard, I've received emails from researchers wondering what was going on.  I shared the suspicions of the suspicious, but couldn't answer their questions and wanted to leave room to distinguish a scam from a clumsy start-up.  I commend Richard for the hard work of pulling together the most complete picture for public discussion.
• Honan says that the company carefully targeted its emails and made only a few mistakes.  I wish this were true.  But if Bentham knows that researchers are good enough to invite to join an editorial board, then it must know at least the fields in which they work.  He says that Bentham will remove anyone from its email lists, or journal mastheads, if they contact the company.  If this wasn't true before, I hope it will be true now.  He will not name the owners of the company and will not say why.  This is very inauspicious, and the owners, whoever they are, should know that.
• I applaud Bentham's use of CC-BY licenses for its OA journals.  That is good without qualification.  However, the policies for its subscription/hybrid journals are not nearly as enlightened.  I'm dismayed that Bentham still does not have a self-archiving policy for its TA journals.  (I asked Honan about this in January, and he replied that the company was thinking about it.)  I'm also dismayed that the policy previewed here would impose a 12 month embargo on self-archiving.  That's the longest embargo on green OA I know, and hard to square with Bentham's support for OA.  Because the Bentham TA journals offer a hybrid OA option, the restriction on self-archiving appears to be a way to steer authors toward the OA option and and its publication fees.
• Finally, I'm not as happy with Bentham's "limited OA option" as Honan is.  His rationale is that "the number of citations a paper receives tends to decline after 12 months. So we don't want to charge somebody a lot of money to have their article up for an indefinite period, when the number of citations they receive will all occur in the first six to twelve months...."  That's true, but only half the story.  It omits the fact that publishers can rarely generate significant revenue from access fees on older articles. Hence, it's in their interest, not just the author's interest, to make articles OA forever once they are OA for 12 months.  Publishers have much more to gain from long-term OA (through increased visibility, citations, submissions, and good will) than from the trickle of revenue they'd get by moving an article behind a pay wall.  If Bentham can cover its expenses with the half fee plus subsequent trickle, then its full fee is too high --or Bentham hopes that the the option to pay a discounted fee for temporary OA will function as pressure to pay a full fee for permanent OA.