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Comment on Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers by Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers by Jeffrey Beall « Huddersfield Open Access Publishing


Comment on Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers by Lars Juhl Jensen

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I completely agree that it is difficult to set down a clear set of criteria – there will always be some non-predatory journals that match some of the criteria. But maybe you’d be able to make a shortened list (some of the criteria are rather similar / specializations of each other) where predatory journals match more than half or something like that. Just an idea.

Regarding sloppy copy editing, Neil Saunders found a great example recently: http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/we-really-dont-care-what-statistical-method-you-used/

Comment on Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers by mikebehm

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I appreciate Jeffrey making his criteria available on the blog. Each discipline, scholar, department, college, etc. will need to develop their own criteria and guidance for judging the worth of an individual journal and publisher; this blog is tremendously valuable for helping individuals engage in a productive discussion to make their own decisions. Each of Jeffrey’s points would not be taken individually as an indicator that a journal or publisher is of low quality. He is simply pointing out characteristics that he has documented in his own research of predatory and low-quality journals/publishers. The list should be viewed collectively when evaluating publication outlets. The criteria he provides should make individuals pause and think about ethics and quality in their own discipline. This blog does just that for me and is so very important – thank you.

Comment on Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers by Charles J Greenberg (@openbiomed)

Comment on Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers by Flyhigh

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Mr Beall, just a friendly advice. It’s time to stop this kind of silly, low quality predatory “research” and more importantly stop humiliating yourself in public line this. Hope you take this as a friendly and constructive suggestion. Trust me, you need more knowledge and education for doing things that you are doing. It may make more sense to use your excessive time going out with your camera to take more beautiful colarado landscape photos for sharing with those real real, hard-working and knowledgeable scholars. The sincere advice from one of your silent friends:)

Comment on Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers by KB

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Hi Jeffrey,

I appreciate your contributions to the vexing problem of how academics, and librarians, can meaningful distinguish among publishers and journals. As the number of Open Access publications continue to explode, these are precisely the types of discussions we need to be having.

My question is a practical one: have you applied your criteria to a universe of OA publishers, or at least to a large subset, in order to start making these distinctions? I find most trail off in naming “good” publishers after they finish listing usual suspects like PLoS and BioMed Central. To further ground this conversation, it would be great to see your views on which OA publishers are reputable (along with those that are not, as you’ve listed in previous blog posts).

Keep up the good work, thanks.

Comment on Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers by Jeffrey Beall

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Yes. I maintain a private “watchlist” of borderline publishers. I keep it private because when I exposed it on my website in the past it had the effect of grouping them in with the predatory publishers, effectively classing the borderline ones as predatory when they necessarilly weren’t.

Regarding listing the top-tier open-access publishers, I don’t do that because it’s already been done very well by others. For example, this list compiled by the University of California Berkeley Libraries is quite well done: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.html Thanks.

Comment on Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers by Marc Couture

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I think what you have done is quite relevant and useful. But, as some have suggested, there is something a little bit too raw in your list of 40+ criteria, some of them sufficient by themselves to disqualify a journal altogether (“Claim to have a peer review but does not”) while others would apply also to serious journals (and I don’t mean the likes of Nature, but small journals with limited resources).

This is not a problem if the list is envisioned, like some have suggested, as a guide to help people judge if a journal is worth reading, or using as a publishing venue. Everyone then knows what to look for, and can make his or her decision as to the relative importance of each criterion.

But it is a problem when these criteria are used to create a prominently displayed list of “predatory” publishers, which earn that strong qualification as a result of a highly subjective process involving such disparate criteria. At least, it would be more appropriate to use a term like “dubious”, because it is true that a “yes” to any, of a few of these criteria raises suspicion.


Comment on IBIMA Publishing: How NOT to Run a Business by Jan Szczepanski

Comment on IBIMA Publishing: How NOT to Run a Business by moom

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All legit journals are also on the list you linked…

Comment on New Open-Access Publisher Copies Another’s Name by Daniel Jones

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Boy do I agree with what you have pointed to as problems with the open access publishing. However, there are several of the traditional publications (e.g. Science and Nature) which have had to retract papers lately. They made headlines, and so the established journals are suffering degradation of their reputations as well as the open access publications.

Where are the solutions to the problem?

One problem I constantly face, as a part-time community college biology instructor, is that I, and my students, cannot access many of the periodicals that appear in internet searches for academic sources. They just pop-up as paid access. Students will not pay for access to those articles, and who can blame them considering the prices? I find it discouraging when students are restricted to scientific sources in the campus library and database, and some of the most popular journals are not available.

Perhaps the traditional journals should recognize the threat to their foundation. People tend to lump similar things together. So tarnished periodicals hurt the reputations of both open access and more scholarly publications. It’s time for the established journals and their database providers to consider the competition and devise ways to relax avenues of access to their journals, either through pricing or rules that will allow students and faculty

Comment on Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers by Jeffrey Beall

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Sounds like a great idea.

Comment on Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers by Paul A. Thompson

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What is with the up-down ratings and the clown comments? You need to get active and ban people. Maybe a subscription model. A lot of junk in the comments here. My very modest comment has 3 down ratings. Nutty.

Comment on A M Publishers Arrives at the Scholarly Open-Access Boomtown by R.A.D.Piyadasa

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Thank you very much again for your comment on the journal of Progress in Applied Mathematics under CsCanada.I was submit to a paper in Quantum Scattering theory.

Comment on Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers by Eric Blalock

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Hi,
Just read your article in The Scientist, which lead me here and I wanted to relay my own brush with ickiness.

As a relatively young (in my research career) researcher going up for tenure, I was desperate to have some kudos in my professional record. I received an email from a publisher inviting me to the editorial board. I agreed and greedily added a bullet point to my CV. A couple of weeks later, a randomly generated article famously made headlines for having been ‘peer reviewed’ and published by this same publisher.

‘Eek’! I thought, and fired an email to the publisher…

“Dear [ ],
Effective immediately, I am stepping down from the editorial advisory board of The Open Longevity Science Journal. Please remove my name from the list of editorial advisory board members.
Eric Blalock”

Their reply
“Dear Dr. Blalock

I have received your email. Why do you want to resign from the editorial board of [ ]? I want to inform you that it would be great pleasure for us if you remain as editorial board member of this journal even if you don’t make any commitments. So, kindly let me know your final decision in this regard.

Sincerely,
[ ]”

-So, I can stay on the editorial board, even if I don’t DO anything? That’s nature’s way of saying ‘do not touch’. Besides, how much longer am I going to be working in science? I have a Nigerian prince on the hook for a couple of million dollars and then I can retire!

My reply …
“Dear Mr. [ ],

My final decision is that I have resigned from the editorial board of Open Longevity Science

And they finally agreed and removed my name.

So, your list is overlong, redundant in some places, and maybe a little snarky, but that’s also what makes it interesting to read. I would suggest condensing by putting things into subject categories- for instance, one category could be ‘editorial board’- and offenses could be ‘fictional members’, members unaware of their membership’, poor-to-no contact info’; another could be ‘website design’, etc. Then group those issues into ‘major offense’ (any one of which would constitute sufficient evidence to claim a publisher is predatory) and ‘minor offense’ (meaning that multiple of these would be necessary to claim predation, and that they might be sincere and reparable mistakes rather than subterfuge).

Thanks for your efforts!


Comment on IBIMA Publishing: How NOT to Run a Business by bencomp

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I like “Communications of the IBIMA” as a title, as if “the IBIMA” is an association like The ACM. I should start “Communications of the Ben”!

Comment on Scientists’ Email Addresses for Sale by Peter Matthews

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There also many kinds of free and not free programmes available for harvesting email addresses from websites… these are essentially robots that can scan text and detect addresses. So it is always best to avoid putting your email address in a public place without some kind of disguise or foil…. the address in the form of a graphic image, or with the punctuation written in words. or use a secondary address for a special public purpose and set this up to forward to your main address. The secondary address can then be discarded when no longer needed, and will be of no use to spammers.

Comment on Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers by Clarinda Cerejo

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Dear Mr. Beall,

This is an extremely interesting and useful post. I appreciate the time and effort you have spent listing all the things to look out for. Clearly, not all criteria will apply all the time, but having read this, I can definitely say I’ll be more watchful.

Incidentally, shortly after I read this post, I stumbled upon UNAIS (http://un-a-i-s.ch/) and sensed alarm bells on browsing the site. The purpose of this journal is to publish papers that have been rejected, and this seems outrageous in principle itself.

It claims to be a “new journal” and does not list any clear instructions for author contributions. Neither does it have any contact information displayed; there’s only a “contact form” that requests your details. Sure makes me want to tread with caution.

I was wondering if you, or any of the readers here, have come across this journal or have views about it.

Comment on A M Publishers Arrives at the Scholarly Open-Access Boomtown by R.A.D.Piyadasa

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Hello,Jeffery Beall, i kindly request you not to stop your ‘Predatory’ research,

Comment on Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers by Jeffrey Beall

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Clarinda,

No, I had not heard of this publisher/journal. Thanks for letting me know about it. I bet it will be home to lots of pesudo-science. I will continue to investigate it.

Thanks again,

Jeffrey Beall

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