In academic publishing, predatory open access publishing is an exploitative open-access publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals (open access or not). "Beall's List", a report that had been regularly updated by Jeffrey Beall until January 2017, set forth criteria for categorizing predatory publications and lists publishers and independent journals that meet those criteria. However, Beall's list was "unpublished" by the author in January 2017 (see below for more details; the list had 1155 inclusions as of 31 December 2016). Newer scholars from developing countries are said to be especially at risk of becoming the victim of these practices.
Contents
History
In July 2008, Richard Poynder's interview series brought attention to the practices of new publishers who were "better able to exploit the opportunities of the new environment." Doubts about honesty and scams in a subset of open-access journals continued to be raised in 2009. Concerns for spamming practices from the "black sheep among open access journals and publishers" ushered the leading open access publishers to create the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association in 2008. In another early precedent, in 2009 the Improbable Research blog had found that Scientific Research Publishing's journals duplicated papers already published elsewhere; the case was subsequently reported in Nature. In 2010, Cornell University graduate student Phil Davis (editor of the Scholarly Kitchen blog) submitted a manuscript consisting of computer-generated nonsense (using SCIgen) which was accepted for a fee (but withdrawn by the author). Predatory publishers have been reported to hold submissions hostage, refusing to allow them to be withdrawn and thereby preventing submission in another journal.
On 25 August 2016, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit against the OMICS Group, iMedPub, Conference Series, and the individual Srinubabu Gedela, an Indian national who is president of the companies. In the lawsuit, the defendants are accused of having been "deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars". The FTC was also responding to pressure to take action against predatory publishers. Attorneys for the OMICS Group published a response on their website, claiming "your FTC allegations are baseless. Further we understand that FTC working towards favoring some subscription based journals publishers who are earring [sic] Billions of dollars rom [sic] scientists literature," suggesting that corporations in the scientific publishing business were behind the allegations.
Beall's List
University of Colorado Denver librarian and researcher Jeffrey Beall, who coined the term "predatory publishing", first published his list of predatory publishers in 2010. After noticing a large number of emails inviting him to submit articles or join the editorial board of previously unknown journals, he began researching open-access publishers and created Beall's List of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers. In August 2012 he posted his criteria for evaluating publishers, with the second edition posted on December 1 the same year. In February 2013 he added a process for a publisher to appeal its inclusion in the list. Beall has also written on this topic in The Charleston Advisor, in Nature, and in Learned Publishing. On January 17th, 2017, Beall's List and accompanying blog were taken offline. In a statement, a spokesperson for CU Denver said Beall made a "personal decision" to take down the website.
Bohannon's experiment
In a more recent test of this evolving system of publishing ("Who's Afraid of Peer Review?"), John Bohannon, a staff writer for the journal Science and for popular science publications, targeted the open access system in 2013 by submitting to a number of such journals a deeply flawed paper on the purported effect of a lichen constituent. About 60% of those journals, including the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, accepted the faked medical paper, and 40%, including the most established one, PLOS ONE, rejected it. Bohannon's experiment was criticised in turn for not being peer-reviewed itself and for having a flawed methodology and lack of a control group.
2015 experiment
In 2015, 360 journals were tested for scrutiny; 120 in each group. Of the 120 on Beall's List, 33% accepted a fictitious and unqualified "scientist" as editor. For the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), it was 7%. DOAJ has since removed some of the affected journals, but not all. For Journal Citation Reports, it was 0%.
Characteristics
Complaints that are associated with predatory open-access publishing include
Growth and structure
Predatory journals have rapidly increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 active journals. Early on, publishers with more than 100 journals dominated the market, but since 2012 publishers in the 10–99 journal size category have captured the largest market share. The regional distribution of both the publisher’s country and authorship is highly skewed, in particular Asia and Africa contributed three quarters of authors. Authors paid an average article processing charge of 178 USD per article for articles typically published within 2 to 3 months of submission.
Beall's list
Beall's list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers attempted to identify scholarly open access publishers with questionable practices. In 2013, Nature reported that Beall's list and web site were "widely read by librarians, researchers, and open-access advocates, many of whom applaud his efforts to reveal shady publishing practices." Others have raised doubts that "Whether it's fair to classify all these journals and publishers as 'predatory' is an open question—several shades of gray may be distinguishable."
Beall's analyses have been called sweeping generalizations with no supporting evidence, and he has also been criticized for being biased against open-access journals from less economically developed countries. One librarian wrote that Beall's list "attempts a binary division of this complex gold rush: the good and the bad. Yet many of the criteria used are either impossible to quantify..., or can be found to apply as often to established OA journals as to the new entrants in this area... Some of the criteria seem to make First World assumptions that aren't valid worldwide." Others find that it is wrong for a single person to maintain such a list, especially when lacking discipline knowledge. Crawford has made critical attempts to verify Beall's list independently, and—documenting numerous instances of inconsistency and ambiguity—concludes that the lists should be ignored, and offers an alternative algorithm based primarily on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Beall differed with these opinions and wrote a letter of rebuttal in mid-2015.
Following the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? investigation, the DOAJ has tightened up its inclusion criteria, with the purpose of serving as a whitelist, very much like Beall's has been a blacklist. The investigation found that "the results show that Beall is good at spotting publishers with poor quality control." However, the managing director of DOAJ, Lars Bjørnshauge, estimates that questionable publishing probably accounts for fewer than 1% of all author-pays, open-access papers, a proportion far lower than Beall's estimate of 5-10%. Instead of relying on blacklists, Bjørnshauge argues that open-access associations such as the DOAJ and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association should adopt more responsibility for policing publishers: they should lay out a set of criteria that publishers and journals must comply with to win a place on a 'white list' indicating that they are trustworthy.
Beall has been threatened with a lawsuit by a Canadian publisher that appears on the list. He reports that he has been the subject of online harassment for his work on the subject. His list has been criticized for relying heavily on analysis of publishers' web sites, not engaging directly with publishers, and including newly founded but legitimate journals. Beall has responded to these complaints by posting the criteria he uses to generate the list, as well as instituting an anonymous three-person review body to which publishers can appeal to be removed from the list. For example, a 2010 re-evaluation resulted in some journals being removed from Beall's list.
In 2013, the OMICS publishing group threatened to sue Beall for $1 billion for his "ridiculous, baseless, [and] impertinent" inclusion of them on his list, which "smacks of literal unprofessionalism and arrogance". An unedited sentence from the letter read: "Let us at the outset warn you that this is a very perilous journey for you and you will be completely exposing yourself to serious legal implications including criminal cases lunched against you in INDIA and USA." Beall responded that the letter was "poorly written and personally threatening" and expressed his opinion that the letter "is an attempt to detract from the enormity of OMICS's editorial practices". OMICS' lawyers stated that damages were being pursued under section 66A of India's Information Technology Act, 2000, which makes it illegal to use a computer to publish "any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character" or to publish false information. It stated that three years in prison was a possible penalty, although a U.S. lawyer said that the threats seemed to be a "publicity stunt" that was meant to "intimidate". This section has been criticised in an India Today editorial due to its potential for misuse in "stifling political dissent, crushing speech and ... enabling bullying". Beall could have been sued for defamation but truth is a complete defense; under section 66A, the truth of any information is irrelevant if it is grossly offensive. Section 66A was struck down by the Supreme Court of India in an unrelated case in 2015, finding that it had no proximate connection to public order, "arbitrarily, excessively and disproportionately invades the right of free speech" and that the description of offenses is "open-ended, undefined and vague." As such, it is not possible for the OMICS Group to proceed against Beall under section 66A, but it could mount a defamation case.
The list was used as an authoritative source by South Africa's Department of Higher Education and Training in maintaining its list of accredited journals: articles published in those journals will determine funding levels for their authors; however, journals identified as predatory will be removed from this list. ProQuest is reviewing all journals on Beall's list, and has started removing them from the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences.
Other efforts
More transparent peer review, such as open peer review and post-publication peer review, has been advocated to combat predatory journals. Others have argued instead that the discussion on predatory journals should not be turned "into a debate over the shortcomings of peer review—it is nothing of the sort. It is about fraud, deception, and irresponsibility..."
In an effort to "set apart legitimate journals and publishers from non-legitimate ones", principles of transparency and best practice have been identified and issued collectively by the Committee on Publication Ethics, the DOAJ, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, and the World Association of Medical Editors. Various journal review websites (crowd-sourced or expert-run) have been started, some focusing on the quality of the peer review process and extending to non-OA publications. A group of libraries and publishers launched an awareness campaign.
A number of measures have been suggested to further combat predatory journals. Some have called research institutions to improve the publication literacy notably among junior researchers in developing countries. As Beall has ascribed predatory publishing to a consequence of gold open access (particularly its author-pays variant), one researcher has argued for platinum open access, where the absence of article processing charges removes the publisher's conflict of interest in accepting article submissions. More objective discriminating metrics have been proposed, such as a "predatory score" and positive and negative journal quality indicators. Others have encouraged authors to consult subject-area expert-reviewed journal listings, such as the Directory of Nursing Journals, vetted by the International Academy of Nursing Editors and its collaborators. It has been argued that the incentives for fraud need to be removed.
Bioethicist Arthur Caplan has warned that predatory publishing, fabricated data, and academic plagiarism erodes public confidence in the medical profession, devalues legitimate science, and undermines public support for evidence-based policy.
In 2015, Rick Anderson, associate dean in the J. Willard Marriot Library, University of Utah, challenged the term itself: "what do we mean when we say 'predatory,' and is that term even still useful?... This question has become relevant because of that common refrain heard among Beall's critics: that he only examines one kind of predation—the kind that naturally crops up in the context of author-pays OA." Anderson suggests that the term "predatory" be retired in the context of scholarly publishing. "It's a nice, attention-grabbing word, but I'm not sure it's helpfully descriptive... it generates more heat than light."