In this episode, we talk with librarian Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado, Denver — who maintains a celebrated scholarly publishing “hall of shame,” the list of predatory open access publishers and journals and blogs regularly at scholarlyoa.com — about the inherent vulnerability of gold open access to scams and fraud, the potential pitfalls of article-level metrics, and where his research on the scholarly publishing environment is headed.
Listen:
Subscribe:
Discussion
12 Thoughts on "Scholarly Kitchen Podcast: Jeffrey Beall on "Predatory Open Access""
I´ve listened with interest this episode.
I feel Mr J Beall is making an unfair trial to many new publishers. Although predatory publishers exist, he includes the name of many new (almost always small publishers, with few defense opportunities) in the list. They should be able to defense themselves and there is no way they can make their voice heard in this trial. Therefore Beall’s list is unilateral and unfair.
In my opinion Beall’s list is gaining much more credit that it deserves.
This is true of almost all blogs…also book reviews, movie reviews, etc.
Watch out — the fabricated quotes should be coming next. . .
If an author has “published” in a non-existing predatory journal (ISI delisted) – is he/she allowed to publish the same article in another “real” journal?
They can always comment on this page of course as you have. Unfortunately most of these so called “publishers” don’t know how to write a sentence in English with no grammatical errors, so they might be shy of commenting. 😉
Please be noted that only few publishers from English speaking countries, not all publishers publish in English. Please be open to look at the world, not only US or uk.
I wonder about the actual impact of predatory publishers. Assuming tenure and grant committees are not clueless (hopefully not too big an assumption, but who knows?), authors get real value by publishing in an established and reputable journal with a good IF. Resorting to a predatory journal, for a young academic, would be like admitting your work is second class.
The problem may not be open access itself, but committees not willing to dig into a publication record and properly evaluate candidates.
The problem may not be open access itself, but committees not willing to dig into a publication record and properly evaluate candidates.
I don’t think anyone is actually suggesting that OA itself is the problem. The problem is unethical publishers combined with (as you suggest) a lack of due diligence. The reason this issue keeps being raised in the context of OA is that the Gold OA model lends itself more naturally to particular kinds of predation than other OA or toll-access models do. Other models have other kinds of problems, of course — like predatory pricing, for example, a problem which has historically gotten far more attention in the literature and in the blogosphere than the problem of predatory OA publishing.
I agree, Gold OA, which can work for legitimate journals, has opened us to exploitation. But, we have a solution. Simply handing a candidate’s CV to a student asst. and checking it against Beall’s list would be a big discouragement. Get the word out that publishing in these journals is a career killer.
Predatory publishing is a problem. But leaving the policing of the problem to a ‘free-range activist’ who has questionable views and an often laughable lack of cultural understanding with regard to our colleagues in the global south is counter-productive. I have drew attention to this in a post a while back:
http://www.semantico.com/2013/04/open-access-vs-neocolonialism-2/
I have also attempted to get a genuine picture of where these predatory businesses are based in order to test assumptions that predatory publishers are (from a northern perspective) an offshore problem:
http://www.semantico.com/2013/05/are-predatory-publishers-an-american-export/
http://www.semantico.com/2013/07/are-predatory-publishers-an-american-export-part-2/
Finally, the suggestion I made (http://www.semantico.com/2013/07/free-range-activism-on-predatory-practices/) that we should come together as a community to tackle the problem of predatory publishing seems to have – sadly – been met with a profound silence. Why is this?
