Many have heard of OASPA (pronounced oh-ASS-puh), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. It’s an industry association that brings together some of the better OA publishers. Now it has some competition. While researching predatory publishers, we stumbled on the website for the Open Access Journal Publishers Association or OAJPA. Unlike OASPA, OAJPA seems to be organized around journals rather than publishers. The site claims membership is free, and it lists about 28 journal members. It appears to originate from India.
One of the site’s information pages is called “Open Access Model,” but the page is a verbatim copy of a work written by OA activist Peter Suber. OAJPA does not attribute the work to him, and it even adds a copyright statement and the phrase “all rights reserved” to the page. Peter’s work is released under a CC-BY license, but because the page is not attributed to him, this appears to be a flagrant case of plagiarism and a copyright violation.
OAJPA also has a page called “Terms and condition [sic] for publisher [sic]” that lists the requirements for joining. Among the requirements are these:
- Perfect Editorial Board
- Serials should not be irregular
- Journal/serial must have ISSN/ISBN
- The website should be perfect and no information should be hidden like publication charges
These are all for a show, of course. Many of OAJPA’s current member journals are filled with plagiarism. Also, the ISBN reference is wrong; serial publications do not get ISBNs.
Conclusion
To attract author fees, predatory publishers need to appear legitimate. The few publishers behind this bogus effort have created a false, industry self-regulation association. It is a dishonest attempt to add a mark of legitimacy to a bunch of predatory journals.
