One should keep in mind that the whole publication system is a mess. The traditional established one is destroyed by network biasing and buddying. The open access system has also cons.
At the end of the day its not the publisher who makes the difference. It’s the quality of the papers that are submitted. The editors can make the selection and make the difference. If the quality is bad then the editors can quit…it’s that easy.
By the way, the editorial boards are full of highly reputated scientists at OAT….see George Perry for example…EiC at Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease…
Concerning the invitation letters…I reveive about half a dozen of them from well established traditional journals every day although my research field is not related to their topic…so what?!
Comment on Publisher Acts Suspiciously Like OMICS Group by illumination
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Comment on Avestia Publishing: A New Bottom-Tier Publisher from Canada by Raghu
Sir could you shed light on this conference please?
http://icsenm.com/
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Comment on Avestia Publishing: A New Bottom-Tier Publisher from Canada by Jeffrey Beall
This is probably a good one to ignore, as it appears to be organized by one of the publishers on my list (International Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (International ASET)).
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Comment on Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2016 by Emerson Jackson
Dear Beall
So what do you think about the “European – American Journal”?
I’ve checked this and realise the names on the editorial board are really credible. So what’s the problem with the journal and why do you think it is predatory?
Regards.
Emerson
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Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by Harvey Kane
It seems to me that the sour grapes you spew would be absent if you were only published in the journal of which you scorn!
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Comment on Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2016 by Jeffrey Beall
Huh? This <a href="http://www.eajournals.org/journals/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">publisher </a>has over 80 journals. Have you examined every editorial board? I think this is a completely bogus publisher, one aiming only to make easy money from gullible, uninformed, or complicit researchers.
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Comment on BioMed Central: New Website, Same Old Low Quality by Toby
Yeah man, but the title of your post was “BioMed Central: New Website, Same Old Low Quality” and this in my view is exaggerated. OK, you caught them there and they should wake up and react to this criticism. But BMC are not a rubbish publisher, The same way that high profile, excellent journals do not become crap just because they overlook a bad paper once in a while and have to go through painful retractions later.
My conclusion is that you made a meal out of this one. Most respectfully etc.
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Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by Harvey Kane
The definition of a critic is one who criticizes. One does not have to know anything about what one criticizes but one does need a sense of outrage. The outrage can be justified or not it just has to be there.
To think the qualifications of the above critics amounts to: they have read a paper, authored one or not, gone to the library or sat in front of their computer. But, not one has been an editor in chief, an employee of a publishing house, an acquiring or sponsoring editor or a publisher. They may have or not known one of the aforementioned but never have been one. They are observers, not doers but observers and things always seem to be clearer to observers. As my old jump master used to say: You ain’t a paratrooper until you jump out of the plane!
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Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by Greg
What do you think of TEM JOURNAL – Technology, Education, Management, Informatics: http://www.tem-journal.com/ ?
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Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva
I Googled Harvey Kane and publishing, and found one profile at CRC Press, of Taylor & Francis?
http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Harvey-Kane/558742093
If so, then let’s begin to have a frank public conversation about something both you and I know, but from different angles: Taylor & Francis.
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Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by Jeffrey Beall
I see no evidence to indicate that this is a predatory journal. It is not on my list.
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Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by harvey kane
Interesting I never googled you. Even more interesting is that I never worked for T&F!
I was VP Publishing American Pharmaceutical Asso., Director Books ACS, Publisher life sciences CRC Press, an editor at Humana Press and at Springer and held various positions at Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc. Started in 1970 and retired 2010.
I always viewed those who perceived they were slighted and then carried their peeve to the public forum as being small.
I avoid those kinds of people.
Also, I avoid those who degrade how people make a living so long as what they do is legal and contributes to the overall good of society. Thus, scientists who chose to partake in the publishing process after being asked generally do so because they like being part of the communication process. The money is for the most part rather small considering the work asked.
Thus, I view this discussion reprehensible.
Elsevier was always good competition and never did anything unethical in their ways that I encountered. You may not agree with their pricing strategy and if so don’t buy their products. The choice is yours! An editor may not choose to publish your article, if so, you have a number of choices among them are to go to another or never send them another one!
If you have complaints about other publishers and they fall upon deaf ears don’t use them. You have said your peace and you were ignored – such is life.
If a publisher(s) does not meet your high standards,I urge you to start a publishing house and establish standards that others will emulate.
Publishers select editor’s in chief under the advice of others in the field. Editors in Chief select editorial boards under the advice of their colleagues in the field.
Manuscript is selected to a large degree by those in the field after the EIC sends it off to members of the board who have expertise.
MS is copy edited and changes are sent to corresponding editors who approve the MS.
Now if you have a better system do let me know.
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Comment on Another Controversial Paper from Frontiers by Esercizi di traduzione - Ocasapiens - Blog - Repubblica.it
[…] in Computational Neuroscience, Jeffrey Beall segnala "another controversial paper" di Ivo P. Janecka – un tempo professore di […]
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Comment on Misleading Metrics by ss
Thanks sir. But i could see there are papers of professors and associate professors in them. A tricky situation, indeed.
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Comment on Another Controversial Paper from Frontiers by Nils
This post on another blog (seen on RW) pretty much sums it up:
http://neuroconscience.com/2016/01/15/is-frontiers-in-trouble/
Notice in particular the “inability to outright reject crackpot papers” issue also raised in the comments.
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Comment on Watch Out for Publishers with “Nova” in Their Name by Claudius
When I received an invitation from Nova Science Publishers to submit a chapter I asked if I will be paid for writing it. I received an answer: ‘The editor will be paid royalties based off of the sales of the book.’ What are your experiences regarding this issue?
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Comment on Watch Out for Publishers with “Nova” in Their Name by Jeffrey Beall
I don’t have any information about their royalty payment policies, sorry.
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Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by Jill Miotke
AnnieL,
First, I would like to point out that I wasn’t sure where to “click reply” in order to put my comment in the stream of replies to your post, so I hope this reply makes sense.
I agree with Nils, below. I do not know of anyone who is a good scientist who can throw a paper together in half a day. I do know that sometimes my submissions have had spelling or grammatical errors, but that is usually due to my being tired and having read the same text so many times that I have practically memorized it and no longer see the errors, and not due to laziness. In this case, these errors have almost always been caught by the peer review. I also take my job seriously when I do a review, and I correct the spelling and grammatical errors I feel qualified to correct. But once a manuscript has been accepted for publication, I am glad that a professional editor looks at it with fresh eyes, whether it is one of my own manuscripts, or one that I have reviewed.
Having said that, however, I am actually a bit disturbed by your statement “I have a PhD in molecular biology, so that means that besides the grammatical and spelling errors, I can also correct any scientific content which doesn’t make sense or is ambiguous. Would you rather someone without a scientific background edited your paper and stuck to the grammar and spelling?” I was trained to believe that it is the job of a peer review to point out to the editor requesting the review when scientific contect doesn’t make sense or is ambiguous. Then, depending on how the reviewer feels about those problems, they recommend either to reject the paper, or accept with revisions if those problems are rectified by the AUTHORS. I would not think that a manuscript would be accepted with these problems, and then allowed to be fixed in production by someone who is not an author. I know that I would be very puzzled, or even annoyed, if I got the proofs back and found that some of the content in my manuscript had been changed. Or do I misunderstand the function of a production editor?
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Comment on Another Controversial Paper from Frontiers by Wazzup?
I am confused, Nils, the author of that blog, Micah Allen, published a paper in 2011 in a Frontiers journal, and viewed 19250+ times:
Allen, M. & G. Williams (2011). Consciousness, plasticity, and connectomics: the role of intersubjectivity in human cognition. Frontiers in Psychology.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00020/abstract
Was Allen’s experience sour? Or was that a nonsense paper?
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Comment on One Problem with the Scholarly Publishing Industry by AnnieL
Jill, I’ve already apologised with regards my “half a day” comment; it was born of frustration with both Jeff’s assumptions about scientists in publishing and a particularly irksome manuscript I’d been battling with that morning. As I said to Nils, most authors obviously take great time and care in preparing their papers and my comment was unfair.
That said, of course production/copy editors are also editing for scientific clarity alongside English clarity. Otherwise there would be no point in publishers hiring people with a PhD in the first place. They could get non-scientist folk with a BA or even just a high-school diploma and a knack for English for much cheaper, I’m sure. You’re correct that evaluating the overall scientific merit of the submission and asking for major or minor revisions is the job of the Editor and the reviewers. What we production editors do is check the small scientific detail. For example, making sure genes/proteins are formatted appropriately (it’s easy enough to miss out the italics on a gene), noticing when an author refers to the western blot in figure 4B but 4B is a confocal image, making sure genes are referred to by their current nomenclature at least once, making sure the same gene name is used throughout, for both gene and protein. Or something like an error I made throughout my PhD thesis, writing ‘translation’ when I meant ‘transfection’ (don’t know what my brain was doing there). These are small errors that a) a reviewer might not notice while keeping their eye fixed on the scientific relevance of the manuscript and b) someone without a scientific background certainly wouldn’t pick up.
Additionally, while you say that as a reviewer you would look for and correct those types of mistakes (for which I would thank you, it makes my job much easier), there are other reviewers who don’t as it’s not actually their job, and they assume (hopefully correctly) that these small errors would be picked up by the production editors and proofreaders.
The corrections we make or the queries we raise about sentences that seem ambiguous to us are made are sent to the authors for approval or rejection before publishing; it’s not as if we unilaterally change content without consulting authors, so I really can’t why you’d be upset. Our authors always seems very happy with the edits we make.
I am aware, though, that the level of content editing we do at our (small) publishers is higher than that offered by many other journals hosted by the larger publishers. For many of the authors who continue to publish with us, it’s this attention to detail which keeps them coming back. If others don’t like it, well, there are other publishers they can choose. There are a range of publishers out there to match the preferences of most authors.
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