[GOAL] Re: Dark Side of Openness: Identity Theft and Fraudulent Postings By Predatory OA Publishers

[Stevan Harnad]

There is no question but that there are junk subscription journals, just as
there are junk OA journals.

But it does not help -- and only compounds confusion -- to conflate the
opportunistic practices of established subscription publishers with the
predatory practices of the growing spate of fools-gold startup journals.
There has never been an opportunity like this before. Subscription junk
journals still had to create enough of a multi-institutional subscription
demand to sustain themselves. Fools gold need merely keep bilking naive and
needy individual authors, article by article, with no more investment than
a website and spam ware. And eventual collapse is no threat: You just
pocket the loot made to date and start up another "journal."

Nothing is gained by treating all publishers as a downward continuum of
scoundrels. It's not true; it's not fair; and all it does is vent a
personally gratifying animus instead of contributing toward any realistic
or practical progress.

Stevan Harnad

On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 4:11 AM, Ulrich Herb <u.herb at scinoptica.com> wrote:

> I tend to agree with Thomas. Of course I appreciate Jeffrey Beals list
> and his work very much, but we should not forget that predatory
> publishing is also a practice of toll access publishers - or let's say
> of publishing itself. And I even think it is more widespread in toll
> access than in open access as TA is more opaque. Just think of Elseviers
> fake journals or the fake reviews reported by the chronicle and others.
> As far as I know some TA publishers start to make OA publishing
> predatory by pushing submissions that did not make it through the review
> process of their TA journals into their fee-based OA journals  ... which
> is just a simple trick to make money from papers that did not make it
> into their TA products and cannot be sold via subscriptions.
>
>
> best regards
>
> Ulrich Herb
>
> Am 19.12.2012 03:25, schrieb Thomas Krichel:
> >    Stevan Harnad writes
> >
> >> The research community needs to unite to expose, name and shame these
> >> increasingly criminal practices by predatory "publishers"
> >
> >    I wonder if there is a criterion for when a publisher is "predatory".
> >
> >> bent on making a fast buck by abusing the research community's
> >> legitimate desire for open access (OA) (as well as exploiting some
> >> researchers' temptation to get accepted for publication fast, no
> >> matter what the cost or quality).
> >
> >    If the aim open access then we should first expose the toll-gated
> >    publishers who have for many years extraordinary profits from
> >    material they obtained for free and that was reviewed for them for
> >    free. Surely the amounts wasted on open access publishing dwarf the
> >    sum spent on library subscriptions to buy access to articles that
> >    nobody ever seems to cite, so probably nobody ever reads.
> >
> >    Cheers,
> >
> >    Thomas Krichel                    http://openlib.org/home/krichel
> >                                        http://authorprofile.org/pkr1
> >                                                 skype: thomaskrichel
> > _______________________________________________
> > GOAL mailing list
> > GOAL at eprints.org
> > http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
> >
>
> --
> Postfach 10 13 13
> D-66013 Saarbrücken
> http://www.scinoptica.com
> +49-(0)157 84759877
> http://twitter.com/#!/scinoptica
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20121219/022ac81b/attachment-0001.html