Jonathan Tennant, Harry Crane, Tom Crick, Jacinto Davila, Asura Enkhbayar, Johanna Havemann, Bianca Kramer, Ryan Martin, Paola Masuzzo, Andy Nobes, Curt Rice, Bárbara Rivera-López, Tony Ross-Hellauer, Susanne Sattler, Paul D. Thacker, and Marc Vanholsbeeck present and explore 10 oft-debated issues in scholarly communication, in particular around open access publishing. They suggest that there are various misconceptions and differing opinions floating around in this realm, and hope to tackle some of these issues in order to bring more clarity to the discussion. Tennant et al.’s selected topics include:

1. Will preprints get your research ‘scooped’?
2. Do the Journal Impact Factor and journal brand measure the quality of authors and their research?
3. Does approval by peer review prove that you can trust a research paper, its data and the reported conclusions?
4. Will the quality of the scientific literature suffer without journal-imposed peer review?
5. Is Open Access responsible for creating predatory publishers?
6. Is copyright transfer required to publish and protect authors?
7. Does gold Open Access have to cost a lot of money for authors, and is it synonymous with the APC business model?
8. Are embargo periods on ‘green’ OA needed to sustain publishers?
9. Are Web of Science and Scopus global platforms of knowledge?
10. Do publishers add value to the scholarly communication process?

Overall, this mythbusting article is useful for clearing up misinformations and misunderstanding about open access publishing.

Work cited

Tennant, Jonathan P., Harry Crane, Tom Crick, Jacinto Davila, Asura Enkhbayar, Johanna Havemann, Bianca Kramer, Ryan Martin, Paola Masuzzo, Andy Nobes, Curt Rice, Bárbara Rivera-López, Tony Ross-Hellauer, Susanne Sattler, Paul D. Thacker, and Marc Vanholsbeeck. 2019. “Ten Hot Topics Around Scholarly Publishing.” Publications 7 (34): 24pp. https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/7/2/34/htm