Predatory open access publishing

In academic publishing, predatory open access publishing describes an exploitative open-access publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals (open access or not). "Beall's List", a regularly-updated report by Jeffrey Beall, sets forth criteria for categorizing predatory publications and lists publishers and independent journals that meet those criteria.^[1] Newer scholars from developing countries are said to be especially at risk of becoming the victim of these practices.^[2][3]

History and Beall's List

The term "predatory open access" was coined by University of Colorado Denver librarian and researcher Jeffrey Beall. After noticing a large number of emails inviting him to submit articles or join the editorial board of previously unknown journals, he began researching open-access publishers and created Beall's List of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers.^[4] Beall has also written on this topic in The Charleston Advisor,^[1] in Nature,^[5] and in Learned Publishing.^[6]

Preceding Beall's efforts was the well-known case of a manuscript consisting of computer-generated nonsense (using SCIgen) submitted by a Cornell University graduate student, Phil Davis (editor of the Scholarly Kitchen blog), which was accepted for a fee (but withdrawn by the author) by one of the open-access publishers now included on Beall's List (Bentham Open).^[7] Doubts about honesty and scams in open-access journals had already been raised in 2009.^[8][9] Concerns for spamming practices from the "black sheep among open access journals and publishers" ushered the leading open access publishers to create the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association in 2008.^[10] In another early precedent, in 2009 the Improbable Research blog had found that Scientific Research Publishing's journals duplicated papers already published elsewhere;^[11] the case was subsequently reported in Nature.^[12]

Beall published his first list of predatory publishers in 2010.^[4] In August 2012 he posted his criteria for evaluating publishers,^[4] with the second edition posted on December 1 the same year.^[13] In February 2013 he added a process for a publisher to appeal its inclusion in the list.^[4]

In a more recent test of this evolving system of publishing (Who's Afraid of Peer Review?), John Bohannon, a staff writer for Science magazine and popular science publications targeted the open access system in 2013 by submitting to a number of such journals a deeply flawed paper on the purported effect of a lichen constituent. About 60% of those journals, including the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, accepted the faked medical paper, although 40%, including the most established one (PLOS ONE), did reject it.^[14] As a result, this experiment was criticised for being not peer-reviewed itself and for having a flawed methodology and lack of a control group.^[15][16]

Characteristics of predatory publishing

Complaints that are associated with predatory open-access publishing include

• Accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control,^[17] including hoax and nonsensical papers.^[7][18][19]
• Notifying academics of article fees only after papers are accepted.^[17]
• Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or serve on editorial boards.^[4]
• Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission,^[1][20] and not allowing academics to resign from editorial boards.^[1][21]
• Appointing fake academics to editorial boards.^[22]
• Mimicking the name or web site style of more established journals.^[21]
• Misleading claims about the publishing operation, such as a false location.^[1]
• Improper use of ISSNs.^[1]
• Fake^[23][24] or non-existent impact factors.

Growth and structure of predatory publishing

Predatory journals have rapidly increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 active journals.^[25][26] Early on, publishers with more than 100 journals dominated the market, but since 2012 publishers in the 10–99 journal size category have captured the largest market share. The regional distribution of both the publisher’s country and authorship is highly skewed, in particular Asia and Africa contributed three quarters of authors. Authors paid an average article processing charge of 178 USD per article for articles typically published within 2 to 3 months of submission.

Reception

In 2013, Nature reported that Beall's list and web site are "widely read by librarians, researchers, and open-access advocates, many of whom applaud his efforts to reveal shady publishing practices."^[4]

Others have raised doubts that "Whether it's fair to classify all these journals and publishers as 'predatory' is an open question — several shades of gray may be distinguishable."^[27]

Beall's analyses have been called sweeping generalizations with no supporting evidence.^[28] Beall has also been criticized for being biased against open-access journals from less economically developed countries.^[29] One librarian wrote that Beall's list "attempts a binary division of this complex gold rush: the good and the bad. Yet many of the criteria used are either impossible to quantify..., or can be found to apply as often to established OA journals as to the new entrants in this area... Some of the criteria seem to make First World assumptions that aren't valid worldwide."^[30] Others find that it is wrong for a single person to maintain such a list, especially when lacking discipline knowledge.^[31] Crawford has made critical attempts to verify Beall's list independently, and - documenting numerous instances of inconsistency and ambiguity - concludes that the lists should be ignored, and offers an alternative algorithm based primarily on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).^[32] Beall differed with these opinions and wrote a letter of rebuttal in mid-2015.^[33]

More transparent peer review, such as open peer review and post-publication peer review, has been advocated to combat predatory journals.^[34] Others have argued instead that the discussion on predatory journals should not be turned "into a debate over the shortcomings of peer review – it is nothing of the sort. It is about fraud, deception, and irresponsibility..."^[35]

As a result of Beall's list and the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? investigation, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has tightened up its inclusion criteria, with the purpose of serving as a whitelist, very much like Beall's has been a blacklist.^[36] The investigation found that "the results show that Beall is good at spotting publishers with poor quality control."^[37] However, the managing director of DOAJ, Lars Bjørnshauge, estimates that questionable publishing probably accounts for fewer than 1% of all author-pays, open-access papers, a proportion far lower than Beall's estimate of 5-10%. Instead of relying on blacklists, Bjørnshauge argues that open-access associations such as the DOAJ and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association should adopt more responsibility for policing publishers: they should lay out a set of criteria that publishers and journals must comply with to win a place on a 'white list' indicating that they are trustworthy.^[38]

Beall has been threatened with a lawsuit by a Canadian publisher that appears on the list. He reports that he has been the subject of online harassment for his work on the subject. His list has been criticized by some organizations which represent open-access publishers for relying heavily for analysis of publishers' web sites, not engaging directly with publishers, and including newly founded but legitimate journals. Beall has responded to these complaints by posting the criteria he uses to generate the list, as well as instituting an anonymous three-person review body to which publishers can appeal to be removed from the list.^[4] For example, a 2010 re-evaluation resulted in some journals being removed from Beall's list.^[39]

The list is used as an authoritative source by South Africa's Department of Higher Education and Training in maintaining its list of accredited journals: articles published in those journals will determine funding levels for their authors; however, journals identified as predatory will be removed from this list.^[40] ProQuest is reviewing all journals on Beall's list, and has started removing them from the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences.^[40]

In an effort to "set apart legitimate journals and publishers from non-legitimate ones," principles of transparency and best practice have been identified and issued collectively by the Committee on Publication Ethics, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, and the World Association of Medical Editors.^[41] Various journal review websites (crowd-sourced or expert-run) have been started, some focusing on the quality of the peer review process and extending to non-OA publications.^[42][43]

A number of measures have been suggested to further combat predatory journals. Some have called research institutions to improve the publication literacy notably among junior researchers in developing countries.^[44] As Beall has ascribed predatory publishing to a consequence of gold open access (particularly its author-pays variant),^[6] one researcher has argued for platinum open access, where the absence of article processing charges removes the publisher's conflict of interest in accepting article submissions.^[45] More objective discriminating metrics^[46] have been proposed, such as a "predatory score"^[47] and positive and negative journal quality indicators.^[48] Others have encouraged authors to consult subject-area expert-reviewed journal listings, such as the Directory of Nursing Journals, vetted by the International Academy of Nursing Editors and its collaborators.^[49] It has been argued that the incentives for fraud need to be removed.^[50]

Bioethicist Arthur Caplan has warned that predatory publishing, fabricated data, and academic plagiarism erodes public confidence in the medical profession, devalues legitimate science, and undermines public support for evidence-based policy.^[51]

In 2015, Rick Anderson, associate dean in the J. Willard Marriot Library, University of Utah, challenged the term itself: “what do we mean when we say ‘predatory,’ and is that term even still useful?... This question has become relevant because of that common refrain heard among Beall’s critics: that he only examines one kind of predation—the kind that naturally crops up in the context of author-pays OA.” Anderson suggests that the term “predatory” be retired in the context of scholarly publishing. “It’s a nice, attention-grabbing word, but I’m not sure it’s helpfully descriptive… it generates more heat than light.”^[52]

See also

• Academic journal
• Author mill
• Diploma mill
• Hijacked journal
• Mega journal
• Open access journal
• Peer review failures
• Pseudo-scholarship
• Vanity press

Past inclusions

• Dove Medical Press
• Hindawi Publishing Corporation
• MDPI

Current inclusions

• Bentham Science Publishers
• Frontiers Media
• Libertas Academica
• OMICS Publishing Group
• Scientific Research Publishing
• World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology

References

External links

• Beall's List of Predatory Publishers
• Beall's List of Predatory Journals