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Comment on BioMed Central: New Website, Same Old Low Quality by Jeffrey Beall

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Indeed, I struggle to understand the paradox as well, and that’s why I wrote the blog post. Why would a supposedly high-quality publisher negligently misstate the impact factor of one of its journals by a factor of three? Also, why would a supposedly high-quality publisher misspell the city as “Istabul” [sic] in the title of one of its published articles? Perhaps their strategy to augment profits has caused them to cut corners and misrepresent.


Comment on Snapshots of Recent Additions to the List of Questionable Publishers by mrtris

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I don,t believe u jeff.IJRAP is not pseudoscience,but real science in traditioal medicine..u are not expert man in traditional med..so i am sure, u make mistakes when including this journal in .your list.this journal is not verygood journal,BUT it isnot predatory journal

Comment on List of Predatory Publishers 2014 by Cristina Osuna

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Dear Jeffrey Beall:

I am a new researcher, I want to know your opinion about “SM Journal of Public Health & Epidemiology”. Thank you.

Comment on Snapshots of Recent Additions to the List of Questionable Publishers by Rob Lopresti

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When I got to “Holy crap” I spit tea all over my screen. Thanks a lot.

Comment on List of Predatory Publishers 2014 by Jeffrey Beall

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I have this journal's publisher, SM Group Open Access Journals, included on my list <a href="http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">here</a>. I strongly recommend against submitting any articles to this journal or to the other journals from this publisher. Good luck.

Comment on Real Location of JSciMed Central Revealed by PM

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I sent an article to this publisher one year ago and after 8 months they sent me information of acceptance. After 4 months without information I sent an email asking them when would my article be published (on a friday) and they told me that it would be on the next monday. When monday came they sent me an email with a copy of the article (with a published date of october) and a bill of 1820 USD!!!!

Comment on Appeals by Zaini

Comment on Appeals by Jeffrey Beall

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Because there are so many individual journals, I always try to analyze at the publisher level, and my analysis is for all the journal from the publisher. So, you mention journals (and a conference) from the Science and Knowledge Research Society and from Indian Society for Education and Environment & Informatics Publishing Limited (ISEE). I have both of these publishers on my list. None of their journals are included in ISI as far as I know, and none of the journals from either publisher has an honest impact factor. Short answer: don’t attend conferences or submit papers to journals from both publishers.


Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by D. Rordorf

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A surprisingly refreshing, although cynical read in your blog. In scholarly publishing you will also find a lot of female employees. They are probably over-represented in this sector. (May be this is not so obvious from industry conferences, where likely the male-dominated manager casts meet). A reason here may be missing part-time employment opportunities and the difficulty to combine maternity with academia, given the immense competition for only few jobs in academia.

Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by quiquelps

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I concur, based on my interactions with journals as an author.
In my country, we have the term “bureaucratic rejection” for rejections done before peer review, likely actually done by someone working FOR the editor. They are sent some 24 hours after submission. How can they be so sure about their decisions? Well, you provide with a good answer to this phenomenon.

Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by Um problema com a indústria das publicações acadêmicas | Blog do Pedlowski

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[…] Por Jeffrey Beall (este artigo foi publicado originalmente no blog do Prof. Jeffrey Beall Aqui!)  […]

Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by dzrlib

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I hadn’t notice this but I do notice a steady influx of former commercial publishing representatives now working for scholarly non-profit publishers. This seems to correspond to an increase in ‘hard selling’ for products that should really ‘sell themselves’ primarily on their merit.

Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by Harvey Kane

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One needs absolutely no knowledge of a field to be a successful publisher in it, What one needs is a sense of market and a willingness to ask questions. The publisher relies on others who have knowledge.

Publishing houses hire folks who want to be in publishing and we avoid those seeking a safe harbor because there is none in publishing!

I do think you are out of your realm here.

Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by Nicholas J. Matzke

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Jeff, I like your blog in general, but this post is just mean-spirited, poorly thought-out, and unfair. Reasons:

1. You present no particular evidence that editors working for publishers are making fat paychecks. I’ve heard that the guy in charge of PLOS makes a ton, but he’s a CEO, not an editor. In particular, how much do *assistant* editors make? How much variation is there? For every “Nature” there are a host of lesser journals.

2. Your implied standard appears to be, “everyone who gets a Ph.D. and doesn’t become a professor is a failure” is just insane. There are more Ph.D.s than professor jobs. Way more. Producing more Ph.D.s is one of the jobs of a professor. Either the entirety of academia is a soulless pyramid scheme that takes smart people and mostly churns out trash for the benefit of a few smart / lucky / politically saavy products who become professors, or there are more valid life choices than getting a Ph.D. and becoming a professor. I’m sensing a lot more out-of-touch-cantakerous-irrelevant-old-professor coming from you on this point, than any actual sense. I’m pretty sure you don’t actually mean it, or wouldn’t if you actually thought about it.

Getting a Ph.D. and using it in your job should be considered the crowning achievement of higher education, and a key part of producing a more enlightened society. Not a failure.

3. As for editors with Ph.D.s…don’t we WANT them to have advanced training? I LIKE it when the editor has some independent ability to judge issues, because god knows, peer-reviewers aren’t always right. In advancing science that is revising traditional notions and methods, the odds are probably 50/50 that a peer-reviewer is wrong about some point, when you as the author are trying to advance some new twist on something. I guess you think an editor should just push buttons and bug late reviewers and then count the votes of the reviewers?

4. On top of all of this, these particular issues are not unique to open access, they are also present in any of the high-profile for-profit publishers, e.g. Nature etc. If you real point is that all journals should be nonprofit society journals with volunteer assistant editors and a poor-paid half-time chief editor at some small college, that’s fine, but you should make that argument explicitly, and also present a coherent plan for how academia should be organized such that this is a feasible career option in a world where being an editor probably counts for way less than publications to the bean-counters determining tenure, advancements, etc.

I think you should retract this post and write a revised one that actually thinks through the issues.

Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by Robert Cameron

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I certainly don’t think Jeffrey should retract this, even though I found it a tad cynical, We should be questioning just what a PhD is for: I agree, not just for academic (tenured) jobs, but there are still far too many, mainly to boost the nominal productivity of the research group leader. You have reached 25+, with a high level qualification that counts for what, exactly?
I did not see Jeffrey’s piece as directed only at OA publishers. I know of the pressure from employers on editors of Society-based subscription journals. The modern world, not only in academic publishing, has become a rat race. Jeffrey has at least exposed the most degrading consequences of this.


Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by Bobo

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Nick Matzke nails it.

I was going to write a post just like this, but I didn’t have the stomach or the energy.

Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by Jim

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Most of the assistant editors I know are recently graduated English majors. They are not living the high life.

Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by wkdawson

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I really appreciate that you are recognising that this is increasingly a general problem not strictly limited to OA, and particularly predatory OA journals.

However, I also think that having a talented editor would probably be a major asset, at least for the research community. An ability to see the significance of a work and not be swayed by smooth talk and rankings would do a lot to achieve something more like fairness in the publishing industry. This is probably measured more on the quality of the individual rather than how successful there are.

If you have access to FEBS letters, you might have a look at some of Jeff’s views.

http://www.febsletters.org/content/jviews

These were written way back in 2002-4, but they are even more true now. That is the true quality of a _genuine_ editor!

Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva

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I think this is an interesting and valuable set of reflections by Jeffrey Beall. Sometimes experience and observation can be superior to evidence-based data, and Beall proves this with his acute sense of observation. In essence, the absorption of some academic drop-outs into the scholarly publishing industry actually makes sense, because some scientists will feel that this is probably the closest that they will ever get to a laboratory after dropping out of the rat race. With more graduating scientists and all too few posts, this trend would not be surprising to me.

However, and here it would be worthwhile having industry insiders who have dropped out of the industry due to disillusionment, to provide some insight into these queries I have:

a) what financial and/or other incentives are there for such individuals to abandon the lab and aim for a desk job? What carrot has been dangled before them?

b) I would like to know the ethical and privacy-related parameters associated with such individuals and the contracts they sign. Have they sold out science?

c) If such PhD drop-outs did not join this industry, then who would be more suitably qualified, a non-scientist?

Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva

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My apologies, I forgot to add a bit of a disclaimer. I have a personal interest in this post by Beall for the following reason. I have had a nasty experience with one such “recent drop-out graduate” who works for Elsevier. I am referring to Dr. Emma Granqvist:
https://www.elsevier.com/authors-update/story/innovation-in-publishing/why-science-needs-to-publish-negative-results

She is formally described by Elsevier as:
“Emma Granqvist is a Publisher for plant sciences with Elsevier, and is based in Amsterdam. Originally from Stockholm, Sweden, Emma started her studies in biology at Lund University. Her main focus was molecular plant science, and she subsequently moved to the United Kingdom and studied at UEA (University of East Anglia) in Norwich. After finishing her PhD at the UK’s John Innes Centre, an independent research institute that focuses on plant and microbial sciences, Emma moved on to scientific publishing at Elsevier.”

A bit more background. In late 2013, I had discovered “irregularities” in the publishing activities of one of the Editors-in-Chief of the world’s No. 1 horticultural journal, Scientia Horticulturae, published by Elsevier. The EIC in question is no other than the honorable President of the Canadian Society for Horticultural Science, Dr. Samir Chandra Debnath of Agri-Food and Agriculture Canada:
http://www.agr.gc.ca/eng/science-and-innovation/research-centres/atlantic-provinces/st-johns-research-and-development-centre/scientific-staff-and-expertise/debnath-samir-phd-pag/?id=1181935271571

Several of the “issues” related to his publications are now, fortunately, archived at PubPeer:
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=debnath
(ignore the first entry not related to him)

I formally, and politely, requested the journal to investigate. I also requested Elsevier to investigate. Included in those contacts was Emma Granqvist, who is officially listed as “a Publisher for plant sciences with Elsevier”. I also requested the Canadian authorities to investigate. Rather than investigate serious claims, I was banned from this journal:
http://retractionwatch.com/2014/04/10/following-personal-attacks-and-threats-elsevier-plant-journal-makes-author-persona-non-grata/
(I have explained my qualms with Dr. Granqvist in more detail at Retraction Watch)

Shocked and angered by this decision, I also contacted her former Professor, Gilles Oldroyd, at John Inne’s Institute:
https://www.jic.ac.uk/staff/giles-oldroyd/

My concerns were how it was possible for a recent PhD graduate to be an expert in publishing ethics, and to be part of a team handing me down a ban for questioning the ethics of an Elsevier journal EIC. My question remains unanswered, I remain banned based on what I perceive to have been a silencing campaign to not reveal the possible academic fraud on the editor board of this journal. And all the while, while I sit penniless and jobless, with decades of experience, Dr. Granqvist, a so-called “professional in plant sciences” with about a handful of published papers to her name, sits on a committee of the world’s most powerful publisher handing out ethical notices.

If Dr. Granqvist was such a motivated and talented plant scientist, then why did she leave the Oldroyd laboratory? Is there a deeper reason behind her leaving that Prof. Oldroy does not wish to disclose? It certainly cannot be funding because the Oldroyd laboratory has excellent and generous funding. What would make a position in Elsevier make a scientist feel more rewarded than working in a laboratory?

I find this to be not only fundamentally wrong, I find that this provides a clear-cut example of what perhaps Jeffrey Beall is referring to. I have questioned the qualifications of some similar individuals who suddenly rise to power and who are given fancy titles but that are not congruent with their experience. And each and every time, my queries are ignored, or shot down. In this instance, I have to share my concerns with Jeffrey Beall, based on my personal, very negative experience from which I am still suffering terribly, physically and psychologically.

As for Dr. Debnath, I have at the end of 2015 called on a formal investigation by the Canadian authorities, including a direct email to the Minister of Agriculture, the Honorable Lawrence MacAulay:
http://www.agr.gc.ca/eng/about-us/minister/?id=1369864009036

If Jeffrey publishes my comment here at scholarlyoa, I will definitely provide an update on this case. I think that it could provide some valuable insight into this topic.

In essence, my own personal experience can indicate that there may in fact be wide-reaching and quite massive consequences of hiring a person who might not be that qualified for the job. Or maybe that’s precisely the qualification that Elsevier wants?

Finally, I should add that I hope that not all such publishing “managers” are of the same caliber, or with the same pseudo-qualifications, so please “AnnieL” above, do not take my critique personally, because it is not directed at individuals like you, who take their tasks ethically, and responsibly.

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