Librarian removes controversial list of "predatory" journals and publishers
insidehighered.com
insidehighered.com
For those who do not know what predatory publishing is, it is basically the "business" similar to diploma mills: they issue crap credentials (by publishing "scientific articles") for a "modest" fee to people who need those credentials to be employed as "scientists", "researchers", and in many positions (including politics) that formally require those. It mostly happens in developing nations...
You wish. You see the same crap in regional universities - faculty must do "research" with undergrads and "publish" the stuff. Back then you had campus journals run by students, but now you have predatory journals. What you don't have is administration with a clue.
Administration entered working life sometime in the early 1990s with maybe one or two papers out of their PhD, they worked their way up the ranks and have no notion what they are doing. They may even think that someone who paid OMICS Open Chemistry to print the paper they wrote about the fluff in their belly button did good work. They may even require n papers for tenure. OMICS will provide! Junior faculty need tenure too!
The axe can't fall soon enough. You can't trust academia to police itself, we need academic administrators on a separate career track to police the bloody lot.
That's interesting. What did faculty do before predatory open access came along? Are the pressures the same as here in the US at minor colleges?
The citation problem you already have. In a previous workplace the materials science people would push for a publication count. Of course they would! In that field the bar for a viable publication is much lower than in the life sciences.
Lists like Beall's seem like the way it ought to be done. The academic identify and compile lists of shoddy publications and their peers can treat those journals an as persona non grata.
No, we don't. Predatory journals are neither run by nor wanted by the academic community. They are a product of exactly such administrators looking at useless stats such as # of papers published in a "journal".
We don't need better trained bureaucrats that will ultimately still just look at "n papers published" or "x citations" or any other mindlessly calculated statistic.
The administrators you mention do not sound like peers (as in peer-review), but more like they are no longer involved in research and just do administrative tasks. If that is the case, then maybe they are simply the wrong people for the job.
Very few people can accurately assess the quality/impact of research, and most of these are the peers themselves, i.e. the researchers/academics currently active in the area. Lists like the one discussed are a helpful tool to do that assessment quicker, as some publications can be immediately flagged for lacking peer-review. But they do not replace actually understanding the research.
$1 billion in damages? Against a librarian? It seems like OMICS International has confirmed they're the worst of the worst.
As such, it is very unusual for a Submitting author to have to pay an OA charge.
COI statement: I used to work for an OA-only publisher, but have not been employed there for the last 2 years.
I wouldn't say that it's rare to have to pay (even for a non-free journal)... in fact it may be more common to pay just based on the number of predatory journals and their published articles, it just isn't ethical (either for the publisher or often for the writer).
Open Access is a trend to combatting the walled garden model of scientific publishing, and is perfectly legitimate.
Scammy journals are taking advantage of authors' needs to publish a lot of work in order to advance in their field. They are "open access" not because open access is a scam, but because the journal is a scam and it's hard to get people to pay for subscriptions to a scam journal.
Yes. Even with "reputable" journals, the revenue flow often works like this:
1) The researcher does the research and writes the paper (usually at public expense). 2) The researcher submits the paper to a journal (often along with a hefty "publication fee"), where it is edited and peer-reviewed for "free" (i.e., also at public expense) by researchers at other institutions. 3) The researcher signs over the copyright to the journal. 4) The journal then charges other researchers, libraries, and the public (who have basically footed all the bills so far) another hefty fee if they want to read the paper.
That's the standard model. Beall's list was of journals that were abusive even by those standards.
Google ["page fees"], and you'll find a whole bunch of them.
I'll be happy to help with getting the data archive.org data if someone gets this started.
quote "There is another list—one that journals fear. It is curated by Jeffrey Beall, a library scientist at the University of Colorado, Denver. His list is a single page on the Internet that names and shames what he calls "predatory" publishers. The term is a catchall for what Beall views as unprofessional practices, from undisclosed charges and poorly defined editorial hierarchy to poor English—criteria that critics say stack the deck against non-U.S. publishers."
"the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.
"From humble and idealistic beginnings a decade ago, open-access scientific journals have mushroomed into a global industry, driven by author publication fees rather than traditional subscriptions. Most of the players are murky. The identity and location of the journals' editors, as well as the financial workings of their publishers, are often purposefully obscured.
1) Traditional Journals: author submits papers for free. Libraries pay to subscribe to journals. Articles are available online only for (very high) fees. The author typically has to sign over the copyright to the publishers, so now the publisher owns the final article, which often was entirely publicly funded (research, writing, peer review), yet there is no open access.
There are thousands of journals, but a few big publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor Francis) own most, and you might have come across their paywalls.
They make obscene profits - their inputs are basically free (articles, peer review), and they charge the libraries extortionate amounts, often through bundling (you want the prestigious journal you must have? well, you got to subscribe to all the other crap we publish, too), literally dollars per page.
2) Resistance. Scientists/librarians etc. noticed and objected. However, it is not easy to change:
Scientists need to publish, and they need to publish in high prestige/impact journals, and the prestige/impact is tied to the title, and the publishers own the titles. (The margins of academic publishers are abnormally high, indicating some sort of market failure.)
Nevertheless, an alternative emerged:
3) Open Access journals. They follow a different model - author retains copyright, and the journal allows open access to the finished article (by putting it on the web, say). As they don’t/can’t make money from subscriptions, they normally charge the author for publication.
So, this is a much better model in terms of, well, open access. Good thing. And, in fact, many grant giving entities (government bodies, Gates foundation, etc.) now stipulate that the research they sponsor has to be published with open access (and they often then cover publication fees).
However, now:
4) Predators: Where previously the journal had an incentive to make the bar for acceptance high (because they needed to sell the result), now, if you get the author to pay and don’t care about sales, you have an incentive to make the bar low.
Thus, predatory OA journals emerged that would basically take the author’s money, say, “yes, nice article, accepted”, and put it on some shoddy website. The author would put it on their publication list - which they now can blow up for a few hundred or thousand dollars.
"Beall's List" just listed these predatory journals of questionable quality that would just take your money and give you a "publication" to put on your CV. It was well know among librarians and scientists that cared, and apparently now it's gone.
(As a sidenote, there also seem to be conferences that are expensive and accept anything, typically in nice locations. So, you basically submit a talk/paper/poster, get a few days vacation, ideally get a travel grant, and then put it on your CV, too.)
what, do you suppose, is the purpose of an open-access journal? why wouldn't an author just self-publish on the web, or on their university department's web-site?
do you have an opinion on what exactly has caused the market failure in traditional journals? if fees are extortionate then why are there no competitors with more reasonable fees?
Because the scientific reputation (and career prospects) are tied to publications in reputable journals, to certain titles. And the titles belong to the publishers. There has been considerable consolidation over time, the big 4 or 5 have just bought up smaller publishers over time, and it's now run not by idealistic academics, but (by all appearances) by cold-blooded money guys trying to squeeze out as much as they can.
Competitors can't just enter - there's a signalling problem: how do you distinguish scientists that don't publish in the top journal because they're idealistically opposed to their closed-access practices, from those that cannot get published there because their work is not up to standards?
1) Open Access Journals: the editors do some editing and vetting, and, crucially, peer review. If you put an article on your website, it doesn't have the same standing, "it doesn't count" as a real article or for your publication list.
So, in terms of scientific reputation, for now:
Traditional journal > OA journal > self-published.
The challenge is to get OA >= traditional, and that takes a lot of time, or, rather, coordination:
Don Knuth sent a letter in 2003 to the editors of the Journal of Algorithms to persuade them to collectively resign and move to a different journal. People of that stature are needed to break the power of despicable academic publishers (Elsevier is particularly revolting, btw.)
See
http://theoryofcomputing.org/crisis.html
Here some more background:
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/08/17/deceptive-pub...
(So, Beall's was a black list, and the DOAJ has sort of a white list.)
- https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%...
- https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20170112125427/https://scholarly...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20170111172309/https://scholarly...
I really like what these guys are trying to do and it goes hand in hand with the topic here. It's 100% legal. Please help spread the word. I contribute the the swarm whenever I can since I don't have bandwidth limits on my household connection. Comcast put 1 TB monthly caps on ~20 states last year, but the northeast is thankfully too competitive to let that fly, especially with Fios also being available here.