Identity Theft and Scholarly Journals

Wow! Who knew that scholarly journals could be the victims of identity theft?  I was directed by colleague Barbara Bintliff to the March, 2013 issue of the journal Nature, which is discussing the new developments in scientific publishing, "The Future of Publishing."  Most of the issue is discussing the move to digital publishing, open access, and how authors in the new model will have to pay to publish so that readers can read for free.  Oh, brave new world! 

But this article, "Sham Journals Scam Authors," by Declan Butler, discusses how the scammers counterfeited two scholarly European journals so closely that they fooled not only scholars, but also Thomson Reuters, publisher of a journal impact rating service.  Hundreds of scholars paid steep author fees to submit journal articles, thinking they were dealing with the editors of the real journals.  The counterfeit sites include such details as publishing frequency, editorial boards, ISSNs, and titles for authentic journals, and fake impact factors numbers for the journals.  Much of the information was false, including editorial boards naming unaffiliated scholars.

The editors of the real journals are fighting a losing and mind-wrenching battle against these shadowy cyber-criminals who seem to be based in Armenia.  They keep being contacted by the poor authors who sent manuscripts and author fees to the counterfeit sites, and are wondering when they will see their article in print. The editors feel that the sham sites have damaged their journals' excellent reputations. Cybercrime police units are not having much success, apparently, tracking the criminals.

The authentic journals were easy prey since they had no web presence of their own.  Rather too late, these two journals are putting up websites or archiving back issues on home pages of the sponsoring organizations. 

The decoration for identity theft is from The Digerati Life by Millie Kay G., a post dated 9/27/2010, "Identity Theft Solutions Using ID Scores." She gives no credit for the image. 

ReadCube offers New Per-Article Access for Expensive Journals

There is an article in the business section of today's Boston Globe about a new start up called Labtiva, and the product is ReadCube Access. Started by two graduate students at Harvard, the service currently provides access to the Nature journal suite of titles. So far, University of Utah is the only partner, but they are rolling it out in the chemistry department this fall to test it.

There is some concern among the administrators at Utah, according to the article, about the pricing of the program and how it may eat up library budgets. The arrangement is like ITunes, in that DRM will allow the individual subscriber only to access the individual article. The article cannot be printed and cannot be shared with others. Articles can be accessed on a limited time basis for $6 or less (depending on the journal), or purchased for $11 or less, depending on the journal. Rick Anderson, interim dean of University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library is quoted,

Our journal collection is very, very lean, ... If we opened something like this up across the campus, you’d be taking a very big risk that your entire materials budget would get blown out in a month, ...

Anderson goes on to analyze a potential danger, not only to university budgets, but to the publishing industry in the model. He also compares the model to ITunes, and draws a parallel to the music industry's experiments with music delivery and DRM. Currently, libraries must purchase an entire journal's worth of articles to obtain the single article that is exciting the research community. That will change with the ReadCube Access model, which would address that market inefficiency. But it would drastically change the financial picture for publishers, who will face the same market upheaval currently shaking the music industry.

There is also a brief mention of the Open Access movement, though it is dismissed as a fringe movement. (Directory of Open Access Journals)

Scholars' Journal Boycott: Open Access Rebellion

On January 21, Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers posted on a blog, griping about the publisher Elsevier (and others). He did a very nice job listing the problems that librarians have complained about as consumer issues:

1. It charges very high prices — so far above the average that it seems quite extraordinary that they can get away with it.

2. One method that they have for getting away with it is a practice known as “bundling”, where instead of giving libraries the choice of which journals they want to subscribe to, they offer them the choice between a large collection of journals (chosen by them) or nothing at all. So if some Elsevier journals in the “bundle” are indispensable to a library, that library is forced to subscribe at very high subscription rates to a large number of journals, across all the sciences, many of which they do not want. (The journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals is a notorious example of a journal that is regarded as a joke by many mathematicians, but which libraries all round the world must nevertheless subscribe to.) Given that libraries have limited budgets, this often means that they cannot subscribe to journals that they would much rather subscribe to, so it is not just libraries that are harmed, but other publishers, which is of course part of the motivation for the scheme.

3. If libraries attempt to negotiate better deals, Elsevier is ruthless about cutting off access to all their journals.

4. Elsevier supports many of the measures, such as the Research Works Act (112 HR 3699), that attempt to stop the move to open access. They also supported SOPA (112 HR 3261) and PIPA (112 S 968) and lobbied strongly for them.

I could carry on, but I’ll leave it there.

Professor Gowers notes that scholars can fight back by refusing to continue editing for, publishing in or doing peer reviews for such journals. He notes that he has stopped doing these things in Elsevier journals and encourages others to do so. I notice that his post has received 31 comments to date, and 83 people have used Google to +1 it, 614 people have shared it on Facebook, and 778 have tweeted it on Twitter, so this is a very hot post.

Gowers wondered if there might be a website where mathematicians who want to boycott Elsevier journals could sign their names electronically. Within a day or two, The Cost of Knowledge appeared, providing just such a website. Scholars from a wide variety of fields (law is not listed, but is subsumed under "social sciences") have signed, and are listed in alphabetical order. Science, math and humanities are all represented. The impressive part is that the protesters pledging to forgo publishing in journals such as The Lancet and Cell, include not just "made" scholars, but tenure track junior scholars, who are truly putting a great deal on the line by joining the protest. As of right now (Feb. 8, 3 PM ) there are 4,713 signatories total on The Cost of Knowledge.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has noted the protest and notes that Elsevier has felt enough pressure to make a statement in response. Librarians who look at the article will not be surprised by any of the justifications from the Elsevier spokeswoman: The steep price increases of the 1980's are a thing of the past and are coloring the perceptions of the problem now. Elsevier claims that it invests a lot in metadata tagging that adds value and links articles together, making research more efficient(and that would not be available if the scholars published their own materials -- UNLESS they worked with librarians!).

The company's support of the Research Works Act is driven by its investment in those products, [the spokeswoman] added: "It's not a disavowal of the National Institutes of Health or of open access. We are just trying to avoid inflexible regulations." The company was the first and largest contributor to PubMed Central, the NIH repository of free, full-text articles,....

Mr. Gowers, ... told The Chronicle that researchers can now evaluate and review one another's papers on open Web sites. "That would be far cheaper than anything a commercial publisher could hope to offer, and just as effective," he noted.

Nor does the Elsevier infrastructure impress younger scholars like Mr. Abrahams. "It could disappear tomorrow, and I'd never notice that it's gone," he said.

If I were Elsevier, and other, similar journal publishers, I think I would be worrying a bit.

Amazon Eliminates the Middleman

Amazon has almost put both independent bookstores and chain bookstores out of business. Are publishers Amazon's next victim? The New York Times is reporting that Amazon has gone into the publishing business. This fall it plans to publish 122 books "in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer's fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers." It is unclear to me whether Amazon will offer its authors the traditional services offered by publishers, i.e., editing and marketing, although the Times article states that Amazon is "gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide." Traditional publishers have already cut back on editing (it's rare these days to read anything that wouldn't benefit from careful copy editing), so it's likely that authors won't lose much if they publish with Amazon. And the article points to efforts already under way by authors to market their work themselves, so they won't miss the marketing campaigns of traditional publishers as much as they would have in the days before authors and their readers could communicate directly. The article quotes Russell Grandinetti, an Amazon executive: "'The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader ... Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.'" One question left unanswered by the Times article is royalties. It seems reasonable to assume that by forgoing the services of the traditional publishers and opting for Amazon, authors should be able to bargain for more generous compensation.

Law.Gov and PublicResource.org: Alternative Gov Docs?

Carl Malamud is posting at PublicResource.org/Law.gov, what he calls "America's Operating System, Open Source." He hopes to garner support, both legislative and monetary, for authenticating and hosting a centralized registry and repository for all primary legal materials. He makes it clear that he is aiming for judicial, legislative and executive branch materials that constitute primary law. He is aiming for the federal level first, and to provide the "open source software building blocks that will allow states and municipalities to make their materials available as well." He specifically compares his vision to the new, federally produced data.gov,

providing bulk data and feeds to commercial, non-commercial, and governmental organizations wishing to build web sites, operate legal information services, or otherwise use the raw materials of our democracy.

Anybody who cares to submit concurring opinions, dissenting opinions, appendices, specifications, or others materials to this report will be invited to do so. It is understood that on a subject as complex as the functioning of our system of justice and our system of legal education there will be many views, and our hope in this process is to stimulate a robust discussion and dialogue on how to move our legal system forward.

Can an effort of workshops, a report, and briefings spur real change in Washington, D.C.? We won't know if we don't try.

This is an opportunity for citizens to help change the way we distribute America's Operating System.

Co-conveners will assist by hosting workshops, symposiums, and other activities during Q1/2010 that will be used as input to the report process. Confirmed co-conveners presently include:

* Professor Pamela Samuelson, Berkeley Law, University of California
* John Podesta, Center for American Progress
* Professor Tim Wu, Columbia Law School
* The Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
* Professors James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, Duke Law
* Professors Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School
* Professor Jessica Litman, University of Michigan Law School
* The Oyez Project, Northwestern University
* Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media
* Professor Edward W. Felten, Princeton University
* Robert Crown Law Library, Stanford Law School
* Professor Terry Martin, University of Texas Law School
* Professor Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School

They specifically reference the AALL "ground-breaking report and AALL National Summit on Authentic Legal Information in the Digital Age...." on the need for authentication of legal information online. Malamud proposes using law students to systematically compare the online versions to print materials for authentication purposes, during the start-up phase. Apparently the students would be unpaid, since Malamud states that the students would gain "reputation points in the registry to demonstrate their public service" when they apply for clerkships or jobs. Malamud has a strict timetable and goals:

It is our goal to deliver, by mid-2010, a detailed report to policy makers in Washington, D.C., including at a minimum:

* Detailed technical specifications for markup, authentication, bulk access, and other aspects of a distributed registry.
* A bill of lading defining which materials should be made available on the system.
* A detailed business plan and budget for the organization in the government running the new system.
* Sample enabling legislation.
* An economic impact statement detailing the effect on federal spending and economic activity.
* Procedures for auditing materials on the system to ensure authenticity.

The original site has links to interesting documents and materials dating from September. More recently, our colleague, Rich Leiter, has taken up the cause in a post at his blog, Life of Books, and Malamud's post at the blog O'Reilly Radar.