issued to Academia.edu by Elsevier offer a revealing example of how this has changed the relationship. Creating a profile on Academia.edu can be seen as one route to establishing an online identity for an academic (we will look at identity in more detail later). An academic’s publications form a key part of that professional identity. In a digital, networked context it makes sense for the individual academic to use this site to construct a central hub for their online identity, including access to all their publications. From Elsevier’s perspective, this means Academia.edu is acting as an unlicensed distributor of their content, potentially damaging their revenue. If we see the establishment of an online identity as now an essential part of what it means to be an academic (as I argue in Chapter 7), then these two demands are now in conflict in a way they weren’t previously.
In addition to conflicts with existing publishers, open access has led to new entrants who are deemed ‘predatory’. These journals often seek contributions and then charge high APCs, and have low academic standards. Beall (2010) characterises them as follows: ‘They work by spamming scholarly e-mail lists, with calls for papers and invitations to serve on nominal editorial boards... Also, these publishers typically provide little or no peer review. In fact, in most cases, their peer review process is a facade’ On his website, Scholarly Open Access (http://scholarlyoa.com), Beall provides a list of predatory journals and also criteria for determining these. Another practice that has arisen is that of ‘journal hijacking’, where an old, existing journal is used to create a false online version to lure potential contributors, again using the Gold OA method to extract money.
So with existing publishers on one side demanding high fees for open access, whilst also continuing with subscription models, and predatory journals seeking to swindle money from authors
