7 ms·

Librarian removes controversial list of "predatory" journals and publishers

89 points by davidgerard 10y ago

Balgair 10y ago
If other readers would like, you can send him an email thanking him for his work and efforts at : jeffrey.beall@ucdenver.edu .
unwiredben 10y ago
It looks like the December 23rd archive at http://web.archive.org/web/20161230053202/https://scholarlyoa.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20161230053202/https://scholarlyo... still has a lot of this information. The January 2017 archiving had it missing.
- justgottasay3 10y ago
  I see names a-plenty in this entry... http://web.archive.org/web/20170112125427/https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ http://web.archive.org/web/20170112125427/https://scholarlyo...
- ivan_ah 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
pjc50 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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).
- jellicle 10y ago
  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.
metaphorm 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
- FabHK 10y ago
  Some background: 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.)
dragandj 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - dragandj 10y ago
    I live in a developing country, and I assure you it's much worse here. I know it _also_ happens in the developed world, that's why I wrote "mostly" in developing nations. The problem exists everywhere, though, and tends to increase.
    - HarryHirsch 10y ago
      and I assure you it's much worse here That's interesting. What did faculty do before predatory open access came along? Are the pressures the same as here in the US at minor colleges?
bbctol 10y ago
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.
SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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.
DashRattlesnake 10y ago
> 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.
turc1656 10y ago
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.
TerminalJunkie 10y ago
Re-publishing comment containing links to original list: - 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 https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%...
- x1798DE 10y ago
  Why is this a disq.us redirect? - https://web.archive.org/web/20170112125427/https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170112125427/https://scholarly... - https://web.archive.org/web/20170111172309/https://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170111172309/https://scholarly...

89 points by davidgerard 10y ago

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

unwiredben 10y ago

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

justgottasay3 10y ago
I see names a-plenty in this entry... http://web.archive.org/web/20170112125427/https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ http://web.archive.org/web/20170112125427/https://scholarlyo...
ivan_ah 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

pjc50 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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).
jellicle 10y ago
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.

metaphorm 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
FabHK 10y ago
Some background: 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.)

dragandj 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.
- dragandj 10y ago
  I live in a developing country, and I assure you it's much worse here. I know it _also_ happens in the developed world, that's why I wrote "mostly" in developing nations. The problem exists everywhere, though, and tends to increase.
  - HarryHirsch 10y ago
    and I assure you it's much worse here That's interesting. What did faculty do before predatory open access came along? Are the pressures the same as here in the US at minor colleges?

bbctol 10y ago

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.

SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago

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 10y ago
> 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.

DashRattlesnake 10y ago

> 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.

turc1656 10y ago

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.

TerminalJunkie 10y ago

Re-publishing comment containing links to original list: - 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 https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%...

x1798DE 10y ago
Why is this a disq.us redirect? - https://web.archive.org/web/20170112125427/https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170112125427/https://scholarly... - https://web.archive.org/web/20170111172309/https://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170111172309/https://scholarly...