I read Mr Beall’s recent interview and I believe his list has helped slow down part of predatory activities, bringing good awareness among scientific society to prevent from bad OA publishers, hijacked journals, etc. However, I do believe good OA publishers, which are also blacklisted by My Beall are growing rapidly and gaining legitimate credit among scientific society. These days, when we search for an OA publisher, Google brings Mr Beall’s insight about the firm right below the search result and scholars as well as legitimate indexing firms can read those contents and make their own judgements. I think Mr Beall has gathered literally all OA publishers appeared within the last 10 years under a single questionable list and very few have been excluded. Therefore, we may think of it as a bias judgement against all OA publishers. I have seen many cases, where an OA publisher listed on his list has managed to receive ISI and Scopus indexes.
In his interview, he argues that some OA publishers may hide their original places and jumps into conclusion that their services are unreliable. I do believe may scholars may develop an OA firm while they are working for a firm and do not want to lose their jobs because of this reason. I don’t see any reason for disclosing all private information over the cyberspace. In addition, these days, it is easy to gather many people from different parts of the world over the cyberspace and manage a web based OA publishing firm. I agree that bad OA publishers do this because they think about money and nothing else but many good quality OA publishers may do this without harming others. What would be wrong if an OA publisher provides good quality papers and rely on subscription fees, only? In such a case, what difference does it make to register an ISSN in United States and work in Germany? As long as the publisher does not want to carry a misleading name like American Journal of business management, it would be no problem I think.
One question Mr Beall raise to bring OA publishers under question was that there would be no subscription for OA products. On the contrary, I think many national libraries think of having hard copies for good quality OA publishers. The papers, which are easily available on an OA website may become unavailable for various reasons such as closing the operation, facing court law, etc. What if a researcher needs a paper published by such OA firm? I have seen some cases where an OA publisher has managed to receive subscription from some libraries. A simple math helps us reach a good conclusion that it would be possible to waive the author fee and publish good quality OA papers and hope to collect subscription fees. I have heard many US libraries support OA publishers whose journals were indexed by ISI. I hope recent OA publishers who wish to stay on business over the long run would also follow this.
Last week, Mr Beall provided us with good news about Life Science journal. I do believe sooner or later, all bad quality journals listed on well-known indexes will lose their credit from those databases and think about doing quality work or running out of business.
In summary, I believe traditional and newly established OA models promote knowledge and if I were in Mr Beall’s shows, I would reconsider my policy of calling them “Predatory publishers”. Just a few years later, many scientific people may come, read Mr Beall’s bias comments and blame him. If Mr Beal is fighting against fraud, any one in scientific community is supporting him, however if he plans to work in favor of well-established publishers and try to kill OA business model, I am afraid, Mr Beall is in wrong direction.
Farid
