I don’t know whether predatory publishing is getting more attention than it deserves. What I do know is that OA advocates have been saying as much for as long as the phenomenon has existed. In that time the number of papers published in predatory journals has grown constantly. If my maths is correct, the figures in Bo-Christer Björk’s paper suggest there has been an increase in four years of nearly 700%.
Like OA advocates, Bo-Christer Björk predicts: “the publishing volumes in such journals will cease growing in the near future”. Let’s hope that is right, but I am not entirely convinced by the reasons he gives for saying that. However, what is most striking to me is that no one seems to be concerned that the research community at large is conspiring in this growth, by willingly sitting on the editorial boards of predatory journals, often without taking any part in the publishing process (by, for instance, peer reviewing papers), and without doing due diligence before joining the board. Since I assume that their involvement is vital to the existence of these journals, is there not an ethical issue here that needs to be discussed? This is not just about education, this about basic ethics surely? And why is everyone focused on educating those who might submit papers but not those who might conspire in the process by joining editorial boards? Anyway, this is what the ABC journalist who spoke to Australian researchers who are sitting on the editorial boards of predatory journals said on Twitter: “Many of the academics I spoke to agreed to be eds of pred journals despite having done no work on them at all. What for?!” https://twitter.com/hagarco/status/641374531341291522 Richard Poynder From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Virginia Barbour, Executive Officer, AOASG Sent: 10 September 2015 09:28 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal@eprints.org> Subject: [GOAL] Re: Predatory Publishing: A Modest Proposal Hallo all - I'm interested in this from a couple of perspectives - AOASG and COPE. I too think that this is getting more attention than the size of the problem merits - which is not to say we should ignore it. I also feel that compiling blacklists of moving targets is not a good use of time. I support much more education, especially at the institutional level. If people are submitting to the wrong journals there is a fundamental failure of mentorship. Librarians are already doing a huge amount of education here - the problem is it is not getting to researchers. Bev, I'm really interested in the website being developed - at COPE we collaborated earlier on with DOAJ and OASPA on principles we wanted journals to be transparent about and would be happy to follow up with what you are doing on this. Ginny On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 8:23 AM, David Prosser <david.pros...@rluk.ac.uk <mailto:david.pros...@rluk.ac.uk> > wrote: I don’t know if the OA community has always welcomed and encouraged ‘internal critique’, but it has been a feature of the debates I’ve been involved in over the last 15 years (and others have much longer OA histories than I do!). I don’t see the problem as being a lack of either internal critique or of voices denouncing dodgy practices. For me, the problem has been the over-emphasis on ‘predatory’ publishers - hardly a day goes by without mention of them - and the overblowing of a small (but real, of course) problem into something that has almost defined OA in many people’s minds. David On 9 Sep 2015, at 22:58, Heather Morrison <heather.morri...@uottawa.ca <mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca> > wrote: Thank you for taking this on, Richard. One thought is whether it would be in the best interests of OA to welcome and encourage internal critique. Perhaps if we were quicker to denounce predatory practices, we would have more credibility when we support true friends of OA (to me, this of necessity includes commitment to quality). Just my two bits, Heather Morrison On Sep 9, 2015, at 6:05 AM, "Richard Poynder" <richard.poyn...@cantab.net <mailto:richard.poyn...@cantab.net> > wrote: What many now refer to as predatory publishing first came to my attention 7 years ago, when I interviewed a publisher who — I had been told — was bombarding researchers with invitations to submit papers to, and sit on the editorial boards of, the hundreds of new OA journals it was launching. Since then I have undertaken a number of other such interviews, and with each interview the allegations have tended to become more worrying — e.g. that the publisher is levying article-processing charges but not actually sending papers out for review, that it is publishing junk science, that it is claiming to be a member of a publishing organisation when in reality it is not a member, that it is deliberately choosing journal titles that are the same, or very similar, to those of prestigious journals (or even directly cloning titles) in order to fool researchers into submitting papers to it etc. etc. The number of predatory publishers continues to grow year by year, and yet far too little is still being done to address the issue. Discussion of the problem invariably focuses on the publishers. But in order to practise their trade predatory publishers depend on the co-operation of researchers, not least because they have to persuade a sufficient number to sit on their editorial boards in order to have any credibility. Without an editorial board a journal will struggle to attract many submissions. Is it time to approach the problem from a different direction? More here: http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/predatory-publishing-modest-proposal.html _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org <mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org <mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org <mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal -- Dr Virginia Barbour Executive Officer, Australasian Open Access Support Group - AOASG Brisbane, Australia ORCID : 0000-0002-2358-2440 web: <http://aoasg.org.au/> http://aoasg.org.au/ email: e...@aoasg.org.au <mailto:e...@aoasg.org.au> twitter: @openaccess_oz skype: ginnybarbour Got an idea for Open Access week 2015? <http://aoasg.org.au/open-access-week-2015/> Get in touch! 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