[GOAL] Re: Predatory Publishing: A Modest Proposal

Thu Sep 10 08:20:01 BST 2015

Hi everyone,

Walt Crawford published data from his DOAJ/Beall journal list evaluations
on Figshare, and I built a rough app to browse the datasets. Richard's post
spurred me to make some improvements. It's still rather buggy but it
appears:

   - Roughly 10% of the journals (some ~1,200 out of ~14,000) included have
   an APC and Crawford ranked as "Highly Questionable" (he manually scanned
   each journal website where available).
   - Another ~4,000 he ranked "Apparently Good", and some 75% of those have
   no APC.
   - Crawford found that nearly half (~3,000 out of ~7,000) of the
   Journal's on Beall's List that are not on the DOAJ he labeled "Ceased",
   "Apparently Dying", "Hiatus", "Empty", "Empty/Ceased", or
   "Unreachable/Unworkable", suggesting that many Beall-listed titles are
   shortlived.

I'd love to hear feedback from anyone who tries out the app, I still have a
few improvements I'd like to add when I have a chance (for example, there
are journals in the DOAJ dataset that are also on Beall's but they are not
identified as such in the dataset, so it's not possible yet to get a clear
view of the entire Beall list).
https://davesgonechina.shinyapps.io/OAJournals2014

Richard's suggestion of a database of editorial board members is a clever
one, this strikes me as very labor intensive if gathered from journal
websites. Do OA journals typically publish a masthead as an article in
databases such as PubMed?

Like David Prosser, I think of predatory journals as the academic
equivalent of 419 scammers. Attempting to track elusive moving targets is
not as effective as creating a set of general rules a researcher can follow
to avoid poor publishing investments in general, OA or not. What Beall does
is similar to manually adding addresses to Google's spam filters, a
neverending Sisyphean task that might be less crucial if we taught everyone
to check email headers and not open attachments from strangers.

Dave

Dave Lyons | Data Integration Architect

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On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 9:46 PM, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 9:07 AM, Lars Bjørnshauge <lars at arl.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi all
>>
>> if you look at Walt Crawfords fantastic work on OA-journals (
>> http://citesandinsights.info/) I think it fair to say that we are
>> talking about 5% of papers published in  fully OA-journals charging APCs -
>> I have not done the exact calculations
>>
>
> The PDF is hard to navigate, but I don't see how even a ball-park of 5% is
> the figure for the ratio of predatory-paid-gold to paid-gold articles
> published (annually, of course).
>
> How was the calculation done? and for what time-base?
>
> If the ratio turned out to be 5% I would call it small (not "tiny," but
> small!), especially because the ratio of paid-gold articles (not all gold
> articles) to all articles annually is probably also small.
>
> But instead of discussing likely adjectives, would it not be more useful
> to see and discuss the data?
>
> SH
>
>>
>> cheers
>>
>> Lars Bjørnshauge
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 2:46 PM, David Prosser <david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Of course being trapped by a predatory publisher is a terrible thing for
>>> an individual.  Just as sending your bank details to a Nigerian oil scammer
>>> and ending up being ripped off is a terrible thing.  And some of these
>>> ‘publishers’ are behaving reprehensibly.
>>>
>>> But I think we have the right to know the size of the problem.  Is this
>>> happening to tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of authors?  You
>>> are asking us as a community to invest time and effort into providing
>>> solutions - let’s know how much of a problem it is first.
>>>
>>> David
>>>
>>>
>>> On 9 Sep 2015, at 13:29, Richard Poynder <ricky at richardpoynder.co.uk>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi David,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Even if anyone knows the answers to your questions they will not capture
>>> the nature and size of the problem of predatory publishing, not least
>>> because the way in which these companies extract money from researchers is
>>> mutating all the time.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> For instance, some have started to impose “withdrawal fees”. This means
>>> that when a researcher suddenly realises that they have submitted their
>>> paper to a publisher they would have been advised not to do business with,
>>> or when their institution says that it is not prepared to pay the APC
>>> because the publisher is on Beall’s list, then the researcher will want to
>>> withdraw it. But when they try to do so they may suddenly discover that
>>> their paper is now a hostage. They will be told they must either pay the
>>> APC, or pay a withdrawal fee. Since the latter will be lower than the
>>> former, this is likely the option they will go for.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Clearly, the latter transaction will be invisible, yet the researcher
>>> will be out of pocket and the publisher will have increased its revenue,
>>> and will as a result be able to grow and expand as a result, and devise new
>>> ways of extracting money as it grows.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> If we are only concerned about how many papers are being published in
>>> journals listed by Beall relative to all papers being published then your
>>> questions may be good and relevant ones. But if we are concerned about the
>>> impact that this activity is having on individuals then I think your
>>> questions do not go far enough.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> For more on this see: http://goo.gl/gybP9G
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> If the above link does not take you directly to the comments I am
>>> referring to, they are the last 5 comments below the interview.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Richard Poynder
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *From:* goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org
>>> <goal-bounces at eprints.org>] *On Behalf Of *David Prosser
>>> *Sent:* 09 September 2015 11:25
>>> *To:* Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal at eprints.org>
>>> *Subject:* [GOAL] Re: Predatory Publishing: A Modest Proposal
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> To get an idea of the size of the problem of ‘predatory' publishers,
>>> does anybody know:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> a) the proportion of papers published each year in ‘predatory’
>>> publishers compared to the total number of papers published worldwide; or
>>> even
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> b) the proportion of papers published each year in ‘predatory’
>>> publishers compared to the total number of papers published as Gold OA
>>> worldwide.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> If I had to guess, I would say that both proportions are tiny.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> David
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 9 Sep 2015, at 09:42, Richard Poynder <richard.poynder at cantab.net>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> What many now refer to as predatory publishing first came to my
>>> attention 7 years ago, when I interviewed a publisher who — I had been told
>>> — was bombarding researchers with invitations to submit papers to, and sit
>>> on the editorial boards of, the hundreds of new OA journals it was
>>> launching.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Since then I have undertaken a number of other such interviews, and with
>>> each interview the allegations have tended to become more worrying — e.g.
>>> that the publisher is levying article-processing charges but not actually
>>> sending papers out for review, that it is publishing junk science, that it
>>> is claiming to be a member of a publishing organisation when in reality it
>>> is not a member, that it is deliberately choosing journal titles that are
>>> the same, or very similar, to those of prestigious journals (or even
>>> directly cloning titles) in order to fool researchers into submitting
>>> papers to it etc. etc.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The number of predatory publishers continues to grow year by year, and
>>> yet far too little is still being done to address the issue.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Discussion of the problem invariably focuses on the publishers. But in
>>> order to practise their trade predatory publishers depend on the
>>> co-operation of researchers, not least because they have to persuade a
>>> sufficient number to sit on their editorial boards in order to have any
>>> credibility. Without an editorial board a journal will struggle to attract
>>> many submissions.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Is it time to approach the problem from a different direction?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> More here:
>>> http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/predatory-publishing-modest-proposal.html
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Lars Bjørnshauge
>>
>> Managing Director DOAJ – www.doaj.org
>> mobile phone: +45 53 51 06 03
>> Skype-Id: lbj-lub0603 - Twitter: elbjoern0603
>> e.mail:  e <lars at arl.org>lbjoern0603 at gmail.com
>>
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>>
>
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