Explores types of unethical publishing tactics among false publishers claiming to be Open Access Scholarly Publishers. Presented at "Discovery to Delivery 5: Better Together", in Indianapolis, on April 25, 2014.
If this Giant Must Walk: A Manifesto for a New Nigeria
Unearthing open access resource evaluation
1. Unearthing Open Access
Resource Evaluation:
Joining Together to Avoid Inadequate Peer Review
Process and Predatory Publishing
Nina Collins
McMillen Library, Indiana Tech
Discovery to Delivery 5: Better Together
April 25, 2014
2. Project Beginnings
Liaison to PhD program, Global Leadership
Our students need instruction on evaluating journals
Acceptance rate
Impact factor and other bibliometrics
Editorial board and Institutional affiliation
Quality of papers submitted
Scope of Journal
Spam email solicitations for manuscripts
“Call for paper”
Root issue: Need to evaluate new Open Access publications
3. Traditional Scholarly Publishing
Traditional Model
Scholar produces a scientific manuscript, then sends it to the editor of a scholarly
journal
Editor reviews the manuscript, then sends it to peer reviewers
Peer reviewers review the manuscript and return the manuscript to the editor
with comments, suggestions, and recommendations
The editor makes a final decision concerning acceptance, acceptance with
modification, or rejection
Author gives all copyright permissions to the publisher, who assumes all costs in
publication
4. Traditional Scholarly Publishing
Editors of journals play a gatekeeping role
Journals require subscriptions for access
Having signed away copyright, creators of the scholarly works must pay for
access
Who pays for access:
Libraries
Institution pays salary of researchers
Grant funded research?
5. Open Access Scholarly Publishing
“By Open Access, we mean the free, immediate, availability on the
public Internet of those works which scholars give to the world
without expectation of payment – permitting any user to read,
download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these
articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or
use them for any other lawful purpose.”
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC),(2013)
6. Green Open Access
Creators are allowed to place a preprint copy of the manuscript on an
institutional repository
Resources on the institutional repository are freely available to all
Costs of maintaining the repository are funded by the institution
Only works when the institution has a repository, and encourages faculty to
archive their scholarly content on the repository
Most traditional publishers support Green OA
As the Interlibrary Loan librarian, I LOVE Green OA. I often check to see if a
resource is available in a repository before requesting ILL
7. Gold OA
Often called the “Author pays” model, used by online journals
The costs of publication are usually funded by the authors, in the form of
“author fees”, or “article processing fees”
Author fees vary significantly based on the discipline and the publisher
Many OA publishers have policies for waiving the author fees for scholars in
developing nations, or who cannot afford the fee
The fee is sometimes paid by the research sponsor (Institution or funding
agency)
8. Benefits of OA
No barrier to access
Taxpayers can access the research they helped fund
Permission to reuse, if giving credit to original creator
Increases visibility and usage of scholarly works
Increases access to scientific work for developing nations
Increases citations of scholarly works (Gargouri, 2010)
Suber (2012)
9. Criticisms of OA
How much value is added by publishers (editors, copy-editors, and
illustrators)?
What are the real costs involved in Open Access publishing?
Green, Gold, Delayed, Hybrid
Business Models
Quality
Discoverability of materials in Institutional Repositories Salo (2007)
Predatory Publishers
Crawford (2011)
10. Predatory Publishers
Use the author-pays model, Gold Open Access
Are not limited to Open Access publications. Can include conferences, or
traditional publishing business models
Remind us that as scholars, evaluation of resources cannot be
underestimated; we must be diligent
Engage in Inadequate peer-review processes.
Look like legitimate publishers
Beall (2013)
12. Unethical Practices: Deception
The websites look like legitimate publishers (ex.)
The journal/publisher name mimics an established journal/publisher (ex.)
Journal name does not reflect geographic location (ex.)
Not indexed by reputable indexing and abstracting services, but claim to be
Coverage is misrepresented in abstracting & indexing services
List databases as abstracting/indexing services that are not true
abstracting/indexing services (ex.)
Make up citation metrics
List people on the editorial board who have not agreed to serve OR refuse to
provide names of editorial board
Lie about location of publisher headquarters (ex. Avens Publishing Group)
Beall (2013)
13. Unethical Practices: Negligence or
Non-adherence to Standards
Inadequate peer-review
A publisher may list the same
editor for all its journals
A journal has very broad
coverage or subject matter
Author side fee
Spelling or Grammar errors (ex.)
Fail to provide contact
information for the journal or
editors
Use email to solicit
manuscripts (spam)
Fleet Startup (ex.)
May not use ISSN or DOIs
Licensing problems (ex.)
Use Yahoo! Or Gmail
addresses
Poor website search
functionality (ex.)
Dead Links (ex.)
Beall (2013)
14. Unethical Practices: Lack of transparency
Claim Peer review, when they do not practice adequate peer review
Little or no information about the peer review process
Fail to clearly state author side fees
Fail to list editorial board or contact information for editorial board
The only contact information for the editor is an online form, or an email
through the website
Beall (2013)
15. Predatory Publishing Quick Check
Has the publisher started dozens of new Open Access titles all at once?
Do the published titles have very few papers (if any)?
Does the publisher send e-mails to myriad researchers asking for manuscript
submissions or to serve on editorial boards?
Does the publisher fail to disclose the names of editorial board members or
editors?
Is the publisher’s address NOT verifiable?
Is there very little evidence of peer review?
Crawford (2011)
16. Peer Review Sting
Predatory Publishers often exercise poor peer-review practices.
Turn around time is very fast (a week or two).
In a recent sting operation, a fake scientific paper, written by a fake
scientist, working at a fake university, was submitted to 304 Open Access
journals.
It was accepted by 54% of the Open Access publications.
Many of the publishers that accepted the paper were listed on Beall’s List
of Predatory Publishers.
Bohannon, J. (2013)
17. Peer Review Fail
In 2005, graduate students in the PDOS research group at MIT CSAIL
built an automatic scientific paper generator, called SCIgen, Stribling
et al (2005).
Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble built an automatic SCIgen
detector, to unmask SCIgen generated papers, Labbe (2013).
Recently, more than 120 SCIgen created scientific papers are being
withdrawn from publishers, including Springer and IEEE, Norden
(2014).
18. Journal Evaluation in Perspective
Peer-review is an integral part of scientific practice. As scholars, we must be
diligent in our critiques of scientific research.
Continued evaluation on the part of scholars marks the distinction between
science and pseudo-science.
Individuals have lost their jobs for publishing in predatory journals, or for
serving on editorial boards of predatory journals. Beall, J. (2014).
One’s professional reputation can make or break their career.
19. Implications for Librarians
Collection Development
Discovery Layer (I used the PPET Project to assess new Open Access journals before
adding them in the knowledge base in WMS)
Interlibrary Loan
Liaison Roles
20. PPET Project
Predatory Publishing Evaluation Tool
Created a checklist tool for emerging scholars to help them
evaluate online journals
PPET Project
Partial online checklist tool
Our Ph.D. Students are distance students
We could tack on an optional user survey
21. References
Beall, J. (2014, February 20). Iceland professor in hot water for publishing in predatory journals. Scholarly Open
Access: Critical analysis of scholarly open access publications. Retrieved from
http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/02/20/iceland-professor-in-hot-water-for-publishing-in-predatory-journals/
Beall, J. (2014, January 24). University of Pristina Rector under fire for publishing in predatory journals. Scholarly
Open Access: Critical analysis of scholarly open access publications. Retrieved from
http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/01/24/university-of-pristina-rector-under-fire-for-publishing-in-predatory-journals/
Beall, J. (2013). Unethical Practices in Scholarly, Open-Access Publishing. Journal of Information Ethics, 22(1), 11-
20. doi: 10.3172/JIE.22.1.11
Bohannon, J. (2013, October 4). Who’s afraid of peer review? Science, 342(6). Retrieved from
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
Crawford, W. (2011). ALA Editions Special Reports : Open Access : What You Need to Know Now. Chicago, IL,
USA: American Library Association Editions
Gargouri, Y., et al. (2010). Self-selected or mandated, Open Access increases citation impact for higher quality
research. PLoS One, 5(10).
Labbé, C. (2013). SCIgen Detection. Retrieved April 23, 2014, from http://scigendetection.imag.fr/main.php
Noorden, R. V. (2014, February 24). Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. Nature News. Retrieved
April 23, 2014, from http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763
Salo, D. (2008). “Innkeeper at the roach motel.” Library Trends: 57(2).
SPARC, (2013). Why Open Access? Retrieved from http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/open-access/why-oa
Straub, D., & Anderson, C. (2010). Journal Quality and citations: common metrics and considerations about their
use. MIS Quarterly, 34(1), iii-xii.
Stribling, J., Krohn, J., & Aguayo, D. (2005). SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator. Retrieved April 23, 2014,
from http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
Suber, P. (2012). MIT Press Essential Knowledge : Open Access. Cambridge, MA, USA MIT Press
22. For More Information:
Beall’s 2014 List of Predatory Publishers
PPET Project
Contact me
Nina Collins
260.422.5561 x 2155
nkcollins@indianatech.edu
Twitter: @CollinsnNina
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/collinsnina
www.collinsn.com
Postscript: Thanks to all who provided great feedback today! Due to good feedback, the PPET Project will
Continue to evolve, beginning with the changing of the name to simply, the PET Project. Thanks again!