Predatory publishing is just one of the consequences of gold open access

I have been closely following and participating in the open-access (OA) movement since 2008. In that year, when the gold OA model fi rst began to be implemented on a large scale, I noticed the appearance of several new publishers that lacked transparency and used deceptive websites to attract manuscript sub missions and the accompanying author fees. Initially, I printed out copies of their web pages and placed them in a blue folder. In 2009, I published a review of the publisher Bentham Open in the library review journal the Charleston Advisor. Writing a second review in the same journal in 2010, I coined the term ‘predatory publisher’ and changed the focus of my informal blog, called Metadata, to predatory publishing. I published my fi rst list of predatory publishers on my old blog in 2010, but it drew almost no attention. In late 2011, gathering together the expanding materials in my blue folder, I published a second list of predatory publishers that garnered much attention. Later in early 2012 I moved my blog to an improved platform and changed its name to Scholarly Open Access. Throughout 2012, I continued tracking, listing, and writing about the new publishers that I added to my list. The 2010 list included 18 publishers, the 2011 list had 23, and the 2013 list had over 225. Also beginning in early 2012, I started keeping a second list of independent journals that do not publish under the aegis of any publisher, and that list now contains over 150 titles. In this paper, I relate the new and important things that I have learned about scholarly publishing, OA, and the communication of science. I argue that the gold OA model is a failure, that the debate surrounding OA has become contentious and divisive, and that the future of scholarly publishing is in peril. Never before has the scholarly publishing industry attracted so much attention from scholars, researchers, and academics. The medium of scholarship has now become the intense focus of scholarship itself, and many have a stake in its outcome.