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...
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Uh, submitters typically pay for all submissions, either in cash or in the requirement to sign over copyright to the journal.
Open Access is a trend to combatting the walled garden model of scientific publishing, and is perfectly legitimate.
Scammy journals are taking advantage of authors' needs to publish a lot of work in order to advance in their field. They are "open access" not because open access is a scam, but because the journal is a scam and it's hard to get people to pay for subscriptions to a scam journal.
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.
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."
1) Traditional Journals: author submits papers for free. Libraries pay to subscribe to journals. Articles are available online only for (very high) fees. The author typically has to sign over the copyright to the publishers, so now the publisher owns the final article, which often was entirely publicly funded (research, writing, peer review), yet there is no open access.
There are thousands of journals, but a few big publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor Francis) own most, and you might have come across their paywalls.
They make obscene profits - their inputs are basically free (articles, peer review), and they charge the libraries extortionate amounts, often through bundling (you want the prestigious journal you must have? well, you got to subscribe to all the other crap we publish, too), literally dollars per page.
2) Resistance. Scientists/librarians etc. noticed and objected. However, it is not easy to change:
Scientists need to publish, and they need to publish in high prestige/impact journals, and the prestige/impact is tied to the title, and the publishers own the titles. (The margins of academic publishers are abnormally high, indicating some sort of market failure.)
Nevertheless, an alternative emerged:
3) Open Access journals. They follow a different model - author retains copyright, and the journal allows open access to the finished article (by putting it on the web, say). As they don’t/can’t make money from subscriptions, they normally charge the author for publication.
So, this is a much better model in terms of, well, open access. Good thing. And, in fact, many grant giving entities (government bodies, Gates foundation, etc.) now stipulate that the research they sponsor has to be published with open access (and they often then cover publication fees).
However, now:
4) Predators: Where previously the journal had an incentive to make the bar for acceptance high (because they needed to sell the result), now, if you get the author to pay and don’t care about sales, you have an incentive to make the bar low.
Thus, predatory OA journals emerged that would basically take the author’s money, say, “yes, nice article, accepted”, and put it on some shoddy website. The author would put it on their publication list - which they now can blow up for a few hundred or thousand dollars.
"Beall's List" just listed these predatory journals of questionable quality that would just take your money and give you a "publication" to put on your CV. It was well know among librarians and scientists that cared, and apparently now it's gone.
(As a sidenote, there also seem to be conferences that are expensive and accept anything, typically in nice locations. So, you basically submit a talk/paper/poster, get a few days vacation, ideally get a travel grant, and then put it on your CV, too.)
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.
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.
[+] [-] dragandj|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DashRattlesnake|9 years ago|reply
$1 billion in damages? Against a librarian? It seems like OMICS International has confirmed they're the worst of the worst.
[+] [-] SOLAR_FIELDS|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bb611|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elliotpage|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jellicle|9 years ago|reply
Open Access is a trend to combatting the walled garden model of scientific publishing, and is perfectly legitimate.
Scammy journals are taking advantage of authors' needs to publish a lot of work in order to advance in their field. They are "open access" not because open access is a scam, but because the journal is a scam and it's hard to get people to pay for subscriptions to a scam journal.
[+] [-] unwiredben|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivansavz|9 years ago|reply
I'll be happy to help with getting the data archive.org data if someone gets this started.
[+] [-] justgottasay3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metaphorm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] an_hn_reader|9 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] FabHK|9 years ago|reply
1) Traditional Journals: author submits papers for free. Libraries pay to subscribe to journals. Articles are available online only for (very high) fees. The author typically has to sign over the copyright to the publishers, so now the publisher owns the final article, which often was entirely publicly funded (research, writing, peer review), yet there is no open access.
There are thousands of journals, but a few big publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor Francis) own most, and you might have come across their paywalls.
They make obscene profits - their inputs are basically free (articles, peer review), and they charge the libraries extortionate amounts, often through bundling (you want the prestigious journal you must have? well, you got to subscribe to all the other crap we publish, too), literally dollars per page.
2) Resistance. Scientists/librarians etc. noticed and objected. However, it is not easy to change:
Scientists need to publish, and they need to publish in high prestige/impact journals, and the prestige/impact is tied to the title, and the publishers own the titles. (The margins of academic publishers are abnormally high, indicating some sort of market failure.)
Nevertheless, an alternative emerged:
3) Open Access journals. They follow a different model - author retains copyright, and the journal allows open access to the finished article (by putting it on the web, say). As they don’t/can’t make money from subscriptions, they normally charge the author for publication.
So, this is a much better model in terms of, well, open access. Good thing. And, in fact, many grant giving entities (government bodies, Gates foundation, etc.) now stipulate that the research they sponsor has to be published with open access (and they often then cover publication fees).
However, now:
4) Predators: Where previously the journal had an incentive to make the bar for acceptance high (because they needed to sell the result), now, if you get the author to pay and don’t care about sales, you have an incentive to make the bar low.
Thus, predatory OA journals emerged that would basically take the author’s money, say, “yes, nice article, accepted”, and put it on some shoddy website. The author would put it on their publication list - which they now can blow up for a few hundred or thousand dollars.
"Beall's List" just listed these predatory journals of questionable quality that would just take your money and give you a "publication" to put on your CV. It was well know among librarians and scientists that cared, and apparently now it's gone.
(As a sidenote, there also seem to be conferences that are expensive and accept anything, typically in nice locations. So, you basically submit a talk/paper/poster, get a few days vacation, ideally get a travel grant, and then put it on your CV, too.)
[+] [-] TerminalJunkie|9 years ago|reply
- https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%...
- https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%...
[+] [-] x1798DE|9 years ago|reply
- https://web.archive.org/web/20170112125427/https://scholarly...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20170111172309/https://scholarly...
[+] [-] turc1656|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|9 years ago|reply