There is no question but that there are junk subscription journals, just as there are junk OA journals.<div><br></div><div>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."</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Stevan Harnad<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 4:11 AM, Ulrich Herb <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:u.herb@scinoptica.com" target="_blank">u.herb@scinoptica.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">I tend to agree with Thomas. Of course I appreciate Jeffrey Beals list<br>
and his work very much, but we should not forget that predatory<br>
publishing is also a practice of toll access publishers - or let's say<br>
of publishing itself. And I even think it is more widespread in toll<br>
access than in open access as TA is more opaque. Just think of Elseviers<br>
fake journals or the fake reviews reported by the chronicle and others.<br>
As far as I know some TA publishers start to make OA publishing<br>
predatory by pushing submissions that did not make it through the review<br>
process of their TA journals into their fee-based OA journals ... which<br>
is just a simple trick to make money from papers that did not make it<br>
into their TA products and cannot be sold via subscriptions.<br>
<br>
<br>
best regards<br>
<br>
Ulrich Herb<br>
<br>
Am 19.12.2012 03:25, schrieb Thomas Krichel:<br>
> Stevan Harnad writes<br>
><br>
>> The research community needs to unite to expose, name and shame these<br>
>> increasingly criminal practices by predatory "publishers"<br>
><br>
> I wonder if there is a criterion for when a publisher is "predatory".<br>
><br>
>> bent on making a fast buck by abusing the research community's<br>
>> legitimate desire for open access (OA) (as well as exploiting some<br>
>> researchers' temptation to get accepted for publication fast, no<br>
>> matter what the cost or quality).<br>
><br>
> If the aim open access then we should first expose the toll-gated<br>
> publishers who have for many years extraordinary profits from<br>
> material they obtained for free and that was reviewed for them for<br>
> free. Surely the amounts wasted on open access publishing dwarf the<br>
> sum spent on library subscriptions to buy access to articles that<br>
> nobody ever seems to cite, so probably nobody ever reads.<br>
><br>
> Cheers,<br>
><br>
> Thomas Krichel <a href="http://openlib.org/home/krichel" target="_blank">http://openlib.org/home/krichel</a><br>
> <a href="http://authorprofile.org/pkr1" target="_blank">http://authorprofile.org/pkr1</a><br>
> skype: thomaskrichel<br>
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