Group items tagged

"A recent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education covers a phenomenon all of us have suspected, mainly because we've seen it via our editorial boards and editorial advisors - the proliferation of open access (OA) publishers with new names, unknown pedigrees, big promises, and fulsome editorial boards, which often spam our editors and advisors with offers to join the parade." This article does a good job of outlining the pitfalls of the author pay model of open access journals. With open access journals the whole idea is to make it so that information is accessible to the public, but unfortunately that access comes with a cost. The cost of predatory open access journal undermines the whole democratic and altruistic intent behind open access journals. By taking advantage of recently endowed academics these predatory publishers cause many problems for both the individuals affected as well as the Open publishing industry. I also like how there is a clear definition of what predatory open access publishing is.

Interview with Jeffrey Beall on predatory publishing, his description of this, stories of scams, where it's most prevalent and his recommendations

This list is not to be taken at face value (many of the publishers on it do have legitimate journals), but it serves as a reminder that there are many predatory journals that ask scholars to pay a lot of money to share their work, and many that also skirt traditional peer review processes in order to get money from unwary authors.

Will show to some colleagues who sometimes are interesteed in publishing issues.

Lists by By Jeffrey Beall of predatory journals Released January 2, 2014

Of the 255 papers that underwent the entire editing process to acceptance or rejection, about 60% of the final decisions occurred with no sign of peer review. For rejections, that's good news: It means that the journal's quality control was high enough that the editor examined the paper and declined it rather than send it out for review.

This article is certainly controversial, and I believe in some way did a service to the Open Access community by highlighting the practice of predatory journals. However, the irony of Bohannon's article, being an example of the kind of "bad science" he describes in his own article is inescapable. First, there is no randomization of his "experimental group", and there is no control group; second, there was elimination of non-responders; third, there was no application of the intention to treat principle in the analysis; and finally there were no inferential statistics and no references! Using his own standard, there is nothing that can be concluded from his study. For the criticism regarding Bohannon's targeting of OA journals exclusively, it is important to note that this experiment has been done before with 'traditional' journals as well- and many of them failed the test of peer review. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/02/27/how_nonsense_papers_ended_up_in_respected_scientific_journals.html

I think Bohannens "study" should be considered more "investigative journalism" than scientific study. While it may have some flaws if held against the standards of a scientific study, as a journalistic piece it goes a long way to justify its central accusation that there are predatory open access journals. He does not claim that there are no or evwen less predatory journals in the tradional sector (although it seems reasonable to believe that it might seem easier to predatory publishers to dupe unsuspecting scientists rather than subscription paying librarians). It demonstrates that open access is not a cure for all the problems besetting acacemic publishing. I think more deeply about it, it shows that author fees for publication may create a buisiness model just as open to abouse as the traditional subscription system. One answer might be to make the peer-review process more transparent, i.e. name the reviewers But that of course has other drawbacks.

This research study was an eye-opener for me. Until this point, I was completely unaware of these journal practices, although I had received several emails from journals I had never heard of wanting to publish papers based on conference presentations.

Although it is important to put those predatory journals under the spotlight so researchers don't fall in their trap, I always wince when I read one of those articles because too few take the time to talk about the good sides of open access journals and many readers will leave the article thinking that open access publishing is bad and not trustworthy. Of course, as mentioned in the Nature Mag article linked in the Guardian article, PLOS are excellent and have very high levels of evaluation, but they are not alone. And I have yet to find a paper that would make the same exercise with both open access journals and subscription-based journals so we could see how bad it is in the publishing world in general. That said, we must do everything within our power to stop those malpractices by predatory journals. (by the way, I have also received spam to publish in journals that were not even in my field of practice by BioMed Central. They are good, they are trustworthy. I wrote to them to say that it looks like baits to send spam calling me a Dr and inviting me to publish in fields that I know nothing about. They removed me from their mailing list but I don't know if they changed this practice)

A blog, Scholarly Open Access. Critical analysis of scholarly open-access publishing, http://scholarlyoa.com/, systematically lists fake academic journals and predatory publishers, who are taking advantage of a some open access naiveté.

"Now, following criticism of its quality-control checks, the website is asking all of the journals in its directory to reapply on the basis of stricter criteria. It hopes the move will weed out 'predatory journals': those that profess to publish research openly, often charging fees, but that are either outright scams or do not provide the services a scientist would expect, such as a minimal standard of peer review or permanent archiving. "

I was reading one of the week 12 additional resources, PKP School: Becoming a Reviewer http://pkpschool.sfu.ca/becoming-a-reviewer/ and came across the term Predatory Open Access Publishing. I guess no matter what, someone is going to try to make a buck. There is also a site that others have posted here, http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ that is where Beall's list is housed. Beall's list is a list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers - a good place to check if you are thinking of writing or reviewing for a journal, if it's on the list do more digging and research on the journal itself before committing to anything. The journal names all sound pretty impressive so you can't tell by name alone.

This list is a helpful tool for authors who are publishing their work in Open Access Journals. It is also helpful for librarians who are acting as advisors for Open Access publishing. Beall's List: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers. This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. It is recommended recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards.

The long list of predatory publishers and journals by Beall is quite daunting. Is this another indication of how cynical a person has to be in every aspect of life - even scholary pursuit? Thankfully there's a record to alert stakeholders of potentially unscrupulous publishers and unvalidated journals.

As I was working on my final project I found myself only able to name 1 OA Journal: PLOS. I wanted to know if there were any other big players in the game, much like the top commercial journals. As a result, google came up with the above site, which works like an index or directory for OA Journals. It's good to see in light of the difficulties that closed access journals have been causing in countries that are digitally divided from affluent ones. Hopefully with the growth of open access titles we will see the digital divide and information gap close. Happy browsing! And please post any other open access titles you have come across! Lets popularize them in our network! One more: http://doaj.org/

The predatory journal example

In other circumstances it would be a good joke, but in science publishing context very, very sad.

I think this is hilarious but the language is unnecessary.

The Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, published in Italy, has been called a scam but it appears on the CVs of several professors at Unisa as the publisher of papers authored by them. This journal, owned by the Mediterranean Centre of Social and Educational Research, will publish an article only on payment by the author of a fee of $200 (about R2200).

"What kinds of knowledge are we going to expect? How we going to incentivize to scientists to share?"

A radical vision of the open access and books: The Political Nature of the Book: On Artists' Books and Radical Open Access. Janneke Adema: http://tinyurl.com/kv5hg2f In this article we argue that the medium of the book can be a material and conceptual means, both of criticising capitalism's commodification of knowledge (for example, in the form of the commercial incorporation of open access by feral and predatory publishers), and of opening up a space for thinking about politics. The book, then, is a political medium. As the history of the artist's book shows, it can be used to question, intervene in and disturb existing practices and institutions, and even offer radical, counter-institutional alternatives. If the book's potential to question and disturb existing practices and institutions includes those associated with liberal democracy and the neoliberal knowledge economy (as is apparent from some of the more radical interventions occurring today under the name of open access), it also includes politics and with it the very idea of democracy. In other words, the book is a medium that can (and should) be 'rethought to serve new ends'; a medium through which politics itself can be rethought in an ongoing manner.

I read his book (Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science) and really loved it. It inspired this blog post of mine: http://www.scopeofscience.com/2014/04/the-need-for-open-science/ Highly recommend that book to anyone who enjoyed his ted talk - it is a quick read!

You can create accout and add your articles - one of the tools for Self-Archiving.

Great facility by Google.

I use Google as little as possible simply because they`re driven by profit,and are capitalistic and predatory by nature. Not a good match for education.