
Librarian removes controversial list of "predatory" journals and publishers - davidgerard
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/01/18/librarians-list-predatory-journals-reportedly-removed-due-threats-and-politics
======
dragandj
TL;DR What Jeffrey Beall was doing could be described as one honest man trying
to fight the predatory publishing mafia, by nothing else but exposing their
misdeeds. Unfortunately, the mafia managed to silence him.

For those who do not know what predatory publishing is, it is basically the
"business" similar to diploma mills: they issue crap credentials (by
publishing "scientific articles") for a "modest" fee to people who need those
credentials to be employed as "scientists", "researchers", and in many
positions (including politics) that formally require those. It mostly happens
in developing nations...

~~~
HarryHirsch
_It mostly happens in developing nations..._

You wish. You see the same crap in regional universities - faculty must do
"research" with undergrads and "publish" the stuff. Back then you had campus
journals run by students, but now you have predatory journals. What you don't
have is administration with a clue.

Administration entered working life sometime in the early 1990s with maybe one
or two papers out of their PhD, they worked their way up the ranks and have no
notion what they are doing. They may even think that someone who paid OMICS
Open Chemistry to print the paper they wrote about the fluff in their belly
button did good work. They may even require _n_ papers for tenure. OMICS will
provide! Junior faculty need tenure too!

The axe can't fall soon enough. You can't trust academia to police itself, we
need academic administrators on a separate career track to police the bloody
lot.

~~~
stinkytaco
I've always wondered about academia's habit of pulling its administrators from
its ranks. I guess it makes some sense (similar to how an athlete might become
a coach), but given that higher ed is essentially a government entity in the
US, it seems to make more sense to bring in professional civil servants and
administrators. It may create a different set of problems, of course, but
academia's tendency to view itself as a thing apart, a thing it's not -- an
independent, strictly scholarly entity -- seems to actually hurt its goals.

~~~
DashRattlesnake
I don't really agree. I'm not an academic, but it's my understanding is that
academia's function is to advance human understanding of various topics. I
would think injecting "professional civil servants and administrators" into
the process would simply push the focus away from scholarship and towards more
quotidian things that the government and the administrators are interested in.

Lists like Beall's seem like the way it ought to be done. The academic
identify and compile lists of shoddy publications and their peers can treat
those journals an as _persona non grata_.

~~~
stinkytaco
What, exactly, are the quotidian things that the government and administrators
are interested in? My point is that academics are already absurdly political,
both internally (the fight for tenure and academic domain) and external
(budgets and priorities). The people who run academia are already basically
professional administrators, once you've set on an administrative path,
research is very hard to undertake. Why continue with the charade? In my
experience, most administrators just want to do their job. I think it's easy
to underestimate the number of workaday government administrators that run
water treatment plants, streetlights, engineers, etc, that just want to do
their job efficiently.

~~~
dragandj
The point is that scientific process requires personal integrity and
independence. The role of scientist is more similar in that regard to the role
of a judge that to the role of a water treatment engineer.

------
DashRattlesnake
> OMICS International, a publisher Beall has previously described as “the
> worst of the worst,” in 2013 threatened to sue Beall, seeking $1 billion in
> damages.

$1 billion in damages? Against a librarian? It seems like OMICS International
has _confirmed_ they're the worst of the worst.

------
SOLAR_FIELDS
I hope someone else takes up the mantle and continues to curate the list.
Unfortunately Beall was in a unique position of respect and academic standing
where his opinion carried most of the value of the list. On its own without
the continued careful vetting by a well-respected and unbiased professional in
the scientific community the list is pretty much worthless.

~~~
bb611
> Cabell’s, which offers services that help librarians, researchers and others
> discover scholarly journals, has since 2015 worked with Beall on developing
> a journal blacklist. That list is slated to launch this spring.

------
pjc50
Note that "open access" in the context of academic publishing is a weasel
word: it means that the submitters of the article have to pay for it instead
of the readers. This can be quite expensive, hence the invention of predatory
journals who want the money.

~~~
elliotpage
While this is true on its face, any OA publisher worth their salt offers a fee
waiver program, and the expection from Day 1 of OA has been that these costs
should be baked into grant applications and funding requests. Many funding
bodies and institutions take care of this for you, having OA funds and
assistance to take care of OA fees and to help direct publishing scientists to
non-predatory publishers (Elsevier in particular can charge obscene OA
fees)and also pick up the tab.

As such, it is very unusual for a Submitting author to _have_ to pay an OA
charge.

COI statement: I used to work for an OA-only publisher, but have not been
employed there for the last 2 years.

~~~
kurthr
The ones who offered fee waiver programs weren't on his list, because they
weren't predatory. For example, PNAS may not be a great journal, but it's
OpenAcess and not predatory... hundreds of others with very similar names to
high profile journals and fake conferences are predatory.

I wouldn't say that it's rare to have to pay (even for a non-free journal)...
in fact it may be more common to pay just based on the number of predatory
journals and their published articles, it just isn't ethical (either for the
publisher or often for the writer).

------
unwiredben
It looks like the December 23rd archive at
[http://web.archive.org/web/20161230053202/https://scholarlyo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20161230053202/https://scholarlyoa.com/)
still has a lot of this information. The January 2017 archiving had it
missing.

~~~
ivan_ah
If I had time today, I would totally put this up on a github repo. It might
not be easy for one person to keep this up, but with pull requests + a
github.io domain, we could keep this good work going.

I'll be happy to help with getting the data archive.org data if someone gets
this started.

~~~
whorleater
I started it at: [https://github.com/peixian/predatory-
publishers](https://github.com/peixian/predatory-publishers). I'll probably do
a few more mirrors and setup a github pages site for it too. Feel free to make
PR's.

------
metaphorm
I'm not familiar with this story but I'd like to learn more about it. Any of
you HN readers can explain and/or link to more detailed summary?

~~~
an_hn_reader
On predatory open access journals and Beall's list:
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full)

quote "There is another list—one that journals fear. It is curated by Jeffrey
Beall, a library scientist at the University of Colorado, Denver. His list is
a single page on the Internet that names and shames what he calls "predatory"
publishers. The term is a catchall for what Beall views as unprofessional
practices, from undisclosed charges and poorly defined editorial hierarchy to
poor English—criteria that critics say stack the deck against non-U.S.
publishers."

~~~
Isamu
Thanks for that link! I was unaware of this trend:

"the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild
West in academic publishing.

"From humble and idealistic beginnings a decade ago, open-access scientific
journals have mushroomed into a global industry, driven by author publication
fees rather than traditional subscriptions. Most of the players are murky. The
identity and location of the journals' editors, as well as the financial
workings of their publishers, are often purposefully obscured.

------
TerminalJunkie
Re-publishing comment containing links to original list:

\-
[https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%...](https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20170112125427%2Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fscholarlyoa.com%2Fpublishers%2F%3A-EibzAO-
QGxTovjeNTBl4GVHW68&cuid=1072384)

\-
[https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%...](https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20170111172309%2Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fscholarlyoa.com%2Findividual-
journals%2F%3AfvH2cJDh0su5KhGqfBVNRgxsTxQ&cuid=1072384)

~~~
x1798DE
Why is this a disq.us redirect?

\-
[https://web.archive.org/web/20170112125427/https://scholarly...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170112125427/https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/)

\-
[https://web.archive.org/web/20170111172309/https://scholarly...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170111172309/https://scholarlyoa.com/individual-
journals/)

------
turc1656
[http://academictorrents.com/](http://academictorrents.com/)

I really like what these guys are trying to do and it goes hand in hand with
the topic here. It's 100% legal. Please help spread the word. I contribute the
the swarm whenever I can since I don't have bandwidth limits on my household
connection. Comcast put 1 TB monthly caps on ~20 states last year, but the
northeast is thankfully too competitive to let that fly, especially with Fios
also being available here.

------
bbctol
Hopefully, this is just another step towards a better scientific publishing
system. Beall's list had flaws, and people rightfully didn't trust a list made
by a single guy without oversight, but it existed to fill an important need.
We'll see what system replaces it.

------
Balgair
If other readers would like, you can send him an email thanking him for his
work and efforts at : jeffrey.beall@ucdenver.edu .

