Responding to Mr Tuffani's interesting comments (and it happens that I do so from ... Brazil where I am at this very moment), I believe he confirms that his articles, in reality, were about problems with the Qualis list that is used to "vet" journals, order them by levels of quality, and which is used for various evaluation purposes in the country, and not about open access generally as Beall's title seemed to indicate.
To repeat myself, the issue is not open access, as Beall's header would lead us to believe; the issue is the process used to include (or not) a title in the Qualis list. The Qualis list is not just about OA journals; it is about all reputable journals. If as many as 200 predatory journals can be shown to be in the Qualis list, this is a serious problem. It undermines the whole evaluation system of Brazilian scholarship. It may even intimate suspicions of corruption, this at a time when the word "corruption" is strongly present in Brazilian daily news (albeit in other contexts, such as Petrobras). The academic communities of Brazil, as well as the researchers of this extraoedinary country deserve much better. Let me make a suggestion to my Brazilian friends: why not have the people in charge of managing the Qualis list join forces with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), including providing some support - both money and manpower - to erect the DOAJ as the tool of choice and the reference to build a credible list of OA journals. Already, DOAJ is moving strongly in this direction and a bit of support would help everyone. Furthermore, this collaboration would bring a great deal of transparency into the whole selection process, and this would be very healthy. Also, any title placed in the Qualis list is there on account of the opinion of a few people. Why niot maintain an open database of the people who stood behind such and such a journal and signed off on its being good enough to be in Qualis. This would create an atmosphere of individual responsibility that could be very helpful. In open source software, bits of code are always attributed to someone. Why not adopt this healthy practise and accompany it with a periodic review of the results every so often (2-3 years, for example), and with different people. Also, people whio have published in a journal should not be allowed to vet that journal: their inherent bias creates an unacceptable risk. CLACSO and Redalyc also have resources and experience to vet journals, and so does Scielo. Why not use these groups as other support groups and sources of advice. I know that Qualis uses Scielo as a list of reliable journals, but it could also use Scielo as the fount of methods to vet journals. One of the sorry problems everywhere, but perhaps even more so in Latin America, is the constant reinventing of the wheel, sometimes bolstered by the "not invented here" syndrome. However, internationalizing efforts at evaluating quality generally improves the very quality of the effort. Finally, library associations could easily band together to build a distributed, vetting system that, again, could help build the DOAJ list as the white list of choice everywhere. If we all knew that, as a matter of course, it is enough to check the basic integrity of an OA journals by looking it up in DOAJ, life would be easier for everybody, including researchers. And perhaps Mr. Tuffani could, in yet another article, elaborate on suggestions of this kind to nudge a number of small reforms in the Qualis list that clearly need to be implemented. He enjoys a wide audience in his tribune, and this is a precious trump card to make organizations such as CAPES move. Jean-Claude Guédon ________________________________ De : goal-boun...@eprints.org [goal-boun...@eprints.org] de la part de Mauricio Tuffani [mauri...@tuffani.net] Envoyé : samedi 28 mars 2015 11:37 À : goal@eprints.org Objet : [GOAL] Re: Still on the scientific open access journals in Brazil - response to Mister Jeffrey Beall Dear GOAL members, Let me please introduce myself. I am the journalist Mauricio Tuffani<http://mauriciotuffani.blogfolha.uol.com.br/perfil/>, quoted by Mr. Jeffrey Beall and Mrs. Bianca Amaro. I am a science writer and collaborator of "Folha de S. Paulo"<http://www.folha.com.br>, the largest Brazilian daily newspaper. I have a blog<http://folha.com/mauriciotuffani> hosted by this newspaper. It is not for me to say on behalf of Mr. Beall, but I must clarify misconceptions related to my posts and articles. I am not a researcher, as correctly said Mrs. Amaro and she is not the first person to highlight this fact. The same thing was said by the board of directors of the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which in 1989 I accused of defrauding the Amazon deforestation estimates. In the following year, the institute recognized its "small error" of about 50% and fired the coordinator of that work. And so it has been all these years. I would like to clarify that I have admiration for the O pen A ccess . However, I am a journalist, and it is my duty to point out distortions that are of public interest. And there have been many distortions in the Brazilian academic production in recent years. While the number of published articles nearly <http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ciencia/2014/10/1531461-producao-cientifica-no-brasil-fica-menos-concentrada-em-sao-paulo.shtml> quadru pled since 200 0<http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ciencia/2014/10/1531461-producao-cientifica-no-brasil-fica-menos-concentrada-em-sao-paulo.shtml> , their relative impact to the world stagnated in the same period<http://mauriciotuffani.blogfolha.uol.com.br/2014/10/15/a-pesquisa-no-brasil-e-em-sp-parte-3/>. Here in Brazil is very common to opt for quantitative growth believing that later will be possible to increase the quality. Because of this frequent illusion the country has mountains of waste in its economy, education, culture and other fields such as science. In Brazilian science and graduate education this quantitative growth without attention to quality involves several activities. Academic publishing is one of them, and within there is Open Access. The common point of all my posts indicated by Mr. Beall is the fact that poor quality journals have been accepted in the Qualis<http://qualis.capes.gov.br> database, of CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel), of the Ministry of Education. Unlike what said Mrs. Bianca Amaro, I do not criticize "the use of this database for evaluation of Brazilian science in graduate programs." I just reported that the Q <http://mauriciotuffani.blogfolha.uol.com.br/brazilian-graduate-programs-accept-201-predatory-journals/> ualis database accepts predatory journals . And I have reported this in all my posts highlighting clarifications as follows: "Both in the online open access, with fees paid by authors, as in the traditional model maintained by annual subscriptions or fees per article download from the Internet, the reputable journals take months or even over a year to review and accept articles, or rejected Them. Accused of prioritizing minimizing costs and maximizing profits, the "predatory publishers" not only reduce to a few weeks the acceptance of articles, but are less selective and rigorous in this process." Mr. Jeffrey Beall's message header "Open Access in Brazil" was in fact too generic, but made no mistake. I have often received information that good Brazilian OA journals —which really want to build the golden road quoted by Mrs. Amaro— are losing the preference of researchers to predatory journals. I do not have metrics to show this preference for predatory journals, but I could show that more than 200 of them were accepted by Q ualis , bringing consequences that come to be ridiculous<http://mauriciotuffani.blogfolha.uol.com.br/fake-professor-edits-journal-selected-by-capes/> or anecdotal<http://mauriciotuffani.blogfolha.uol.com.br/fasten-your-seat-belts-the-editor-is-gone/>. Perhaps M r s. Amaro does not know this situation —and I do not know if she ought to know it— but those who should know it act like they did not know: CAPES, CNP q (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development), state funding agencies and universities. I am very glad that this issue has been brought to this discussion group. Sometimes problems of Brazilian science have been resolved " with a little help from " its friends outside Brazil. It happened, for example, with the fraudulent estimate of Amazon deforestation to which I referred at the beginning of this message. If the growing garbage from predatory journals in Brazil continue to be ignored, it will become much larger than the bucolic "golden road in the country" glorified by Mrs. Amaro. With my due respect for her opinion, I think her overreaction to the generic header of Mr. Beall's message is actually a disregard of a serious threat to the Open Access in Brazil. This threat is the inclusion of predatory journals in Q ualis supported by the code of silence around this issue in the Brazilian academia. ( I know that I stretched too much what I had to say, but I ca n not resist sharing the following. I received right now a message sent by a full professor. He criticizes me for the inclusion of a journal on my list of "predatory Q ualis ". And this journal says on its website: "21 <http://omicsonline.org/submitmanuscript-clinical-experimental-cardiology-open-access.php> day rapid review process with international peer-review standards".) Thank you for your attention. *************************** Maurício Tuffani Journalist, science writer São Paulo, SP, Brazil Mobile: +55 11 99164-8443<tel:%2B55%2011%2099164-8443> Phone: +55 11 2366-9949<tel:%2B55%2011%202366-9949> http://folha.com/mauriciotuffani mauri...@tuffani.net<mailto:mauri...@tuffani.net> *************************** _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
