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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 misde

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?
    - dragandj 10y ago
      The formal requirements were looser, with no requirement to publish X papers in "international journals".
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  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.
  - dragandj 10y ago
    The formal, professional administration might be one of the sources of the problem. How is a professional administrator going to distinguish people? By looking at formal requirements, of course. So, how many papers does person X have? 3? Want to beef up the resume? Some hundreds/thousands of dollars invested and here you are - the same person with 78 papers.
    - HarryHirsch 10y ago
      What you really need is a sensible process that isn't administered by those subject to it. Else you have all the tenured faculty sitting in a circle, handing an easy job to the person on their right, and all the hard work that's left is dropped onto the untenured faculty. Or you have senior tenured faculty in their mid-50s dumb as nuts (because when they entered working life anyone with a pulse could find a nice job in industry) holding back junior faculty and progress in general, for fear that their achievements would throw shade on them. You can't rely on a sense of duty and community, that train left the US when Reagan came in. The citation problem you already have. In a previous workplace the materials science people would push for a publication count. Of course they would! In that field the bar for a viable publication is much lower than in the life sciences.
  - DashRattlesnake 10y ago
    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.
- jmiserez 10y ago
  > we need academic administrators on a separate career track to police the bloody lot. No, we don't. Predatory journals are neither run by nor wanted by the academic community. They are a product of exactly such administrators looking at useless stats such as # of papers published in a "journal". We don't need better trained bureaucrats that will ultimately still just look at "n papers published" or "x citations" or any other mindlessly calculated statistic. The administrators you mention do not sound like peers (as in peer-review), but more like they are no longer involved in research and just do administrative tasks. If that is the case, then maybe they are simply the wrong people for the job. Very few people can accurately assess the quality/impact of research, and most of these are the peers themselves, i.e. the researchers/academics currently active in the area. Lists like the one discussed are a helpful tool to do that assessment quicker, as some publications can be immediately flagged for lacking peer-review. But they do not replace actually understanding the research.

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?
  - dragandj 10y ago
    The formal requirements were looser, with no requirement to publish X papers in "international journals".
stinkytaco 10y ago
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.
- dragandj 10y ago
  The formal, professional administration might be one of the sources of the problem. How is a professional administrator going to distinguish people? By looking at formal requirements, of course. So, how many papers does person X have? 3? Want to beef up the resume? Some hundreds/thousands of dollars invested and here you are - the same person with 78 papers.
  - HarryHirsch 10y ago
    What you really need is a sensible process that isn't administered by those subject to it. Else you have all the tenured faculty sitting in a circle, handing an easy job to the person on their right, and all the hard work that's left is dropped onto the untenured faculty. Or you have senior tenured faculty in their mid-50s dumb as nuts (because when they entered working life anyone with a pulse could find a nice job in industry) holding back junior faculty and progress in general, for fear that their achievements would throw shade on them. You can't rely on a sense of duty and community, that train left the US when Reagan came in. The citation problem you already have. In a previous workplace the materials science people would push for a publication count. Of course they would! In that field the bar for a viable publication is much lower than in the life sciences.
- DashRattlesnake 10y ago
  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.
jmiserez 10y ago
> we need academic administrators on a separate career track to police the bloody lot. No, we don't. Predatory journals are neither run by nor wanted by the academic community. They are a product of exactly such administrators looking at useless stats such as # of papers published in a "journal". We don't need better trained bureaucrats that will ultimately still just look at "n papers published" or "x citations" or any other mindlessly calculated statistic. The administrators you mention do not sound like peers (as in peer-review), but more like they are no longer involved in research and just do administrative tasks. If that is the case, then maybe they are simply the wrong people for the job. Very few people can accurately assess the quality/impact of research, and most of these are the peers themselves, i.e. the researchers/academics currently active in the area. Lists like the one discussed are a helpful tool to do that assessment quicker, as some publications can be immediately flagged for lacking peer-review. But they do not replace actually understanding the research.