From the bylaws of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
http://www.oaspa.org/bylaws.php

To be considered an OA scholarly publisher and eligible for full membership… the Publisher must… Publish at least one OA journal that regularly publishes original research or scholarship, all of which is OA… [which] includes… Copyright holders allow users to “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship…” [i.e., "libre" OA]

It is exceedingly difficult to see the value to OA itself  of: 

– (1) officially including as “full members” of an “OA Scholarly Publishers Association” publishers that oppose immediate OA Self-Archiving by their authors (such publishers can now even proudly say of themselves that they are “full OA” journal publishers in good standing if they publish one single libre Gold OA journal while forbidding Green OA self-archiving for their 999 other journals)

– (2) officially excluding from an ”OA Scholarly Publishers Association” publishers every one of whose 999 journals are gratis Gold OA, perhaps not even charging a penny for it, as not being “full OA” journal publishers in good standing, because they are not “libre” Gold OA.

http://poynder.blogspot.com/2009/09/compact-for-open-access-publishing.html Richard Poynder was right (again):  ”officially” sanctioning this perverse play on words will not only 

(a) allow being an “OA publisher,” “Gold OA publisher” and “full OA” publisher in good standing to be touted and promoted in a self-interested, word-bending way by publishers that are just about as far from being OA as a publisher can be,

(b) prevent publishers that are genuinely “full OA” publishers (fully gratis OA, hence fully Gold, and hence fully Green, for all their journals, hence fully OA) by any rational construal of “full OA publisher” from calling themselves “full OA publishers” in good standing, and

(c) add yet another unwelcome layer to the confusion about the meaning of “OA” as well as of being an “OA publisher” that we owe to the premature, persistent and counterproductive profusion of gold dust and publishing-economics in place of OA.

Full members should only be publishers all or most of whose journals are Gold OA (and all of whose journals are Green OA); otherwise just “Associate” members. (And gratis OA journal publishers should either be full OASPA members or we should stop repeating the slogan that “most OA journals do not charge for publication.”)

Of course it is the publisher that represents the journal.  But reserving full OASPA membership for publishers all or most of whose journals are Gold OA would rule out the obvious abuse of “full OA” status by a publisher that publishes a fleet of 1000 journals, only one of them OA, yet currently entitled to call itself an “OA publisher” in virtue of full membership in good standing in OASPA. Such a publisher would then simply be an Associate Member of OASPA. (An independent journal, by the way, not associated with a “publishing house,”  is simply its own publisher.) That would remedy abuse of full membership status by publishers.

But to remedy the very meaning of OA and OA journal, it would be just as important to admit as full members the publishers of (all or mostly) gratis OA journals (including gratis OA journals that do not charge authors or their institutions/funders for publication, but make ends meet from subscriptions or subsidy). Yes, fee-free gratis OA journals represent a different “business model,” but nevertheless they are “fully” OA in every respect.

(It also seems fine to accept hybrid Gold OA publishers  as Associate Members, given that the Association’s interest seems to be primarily in OA publishing business models.) 

Referring to the Sokal affair as a ‘hoax’ or to your own action as a ‘prank’ is simply a description of the form that the action took.

By submitting a nonsense paper you inarguably succeeded in making a fool out of the publisher concerned, and so it meets the definition of a prank.
That is not to say that pranks can’t be informative or scientific. Physicist Richard Feynman, for example, was a well known prankster.

That your submission was ‘inspired’ by Sokal was suggested by the explicit reference to the Sokal affair in your March blog post:

“I must admit that my “research” may be questioned on ethical grounds considering that I wasted the time of an editor and two reviewers. I took a little consolation in the fact that other respectable researchers have used this technique to test peer review. Many of you will remember the Sokal affair, in which a physicist tested his theory that a nonsensical article would be accepted by a postmodern humanities journal if it sounded good and flattered the editor.”

Of course, the exact circumstances and methods varied somewhat between your own fake submission and Sokal’s. But saying that one was inspired by the other was of course not intended to suggest that the two were precisely identical in all respects.

Lastly, if the intention of the submission was to be a scientific test, rather than a (potentially informative) prank, it would surely have been advisable to use a sample size of more than one, and some kind of control involving submission to comparable subscription-access journals? There is no question that the acceptance of the article demonstrates a flawed peer review process at the journal concerned - but extending from this one-off result to the broader suggestion that “an academic pay-to-publish model may be susceptible to commercial exploitation” is certainly an inappropriate generalization.

Best regards,
The OASPA Board

Firstly, the OASPA frames the action as a “prank,” which is unfortunate because it misses what can be learned from the affair and attempts to blame the messengers for bringing news that OASPA doesn’t wish to hear — that an academic pay-to-publish model may be susceptible to commercial exploitation.

Secondly, the OASPA believes that Alan Sokal was the inspiration for our experiment, which is clearly not the case. Sokal wished to see whether a human-generated paper filled with errors could be published in a post-modern humanities journal if it sounded scholarly.

In our experiment, we wished to test whether a producer-pays OA journal maintains a credible peer-review system. In the case described, the publisher clearly failed the test.

Lastly, unlike the Sokal hoax, we retracted our article *before* publication.

I realize that you wish to use this affair to promote your own organization; however, it is important that you describe this affair fairly (as a “test”, not a “prank”), and do not ascribe erroneous inspiration.