Of course being trapped by a predatory publisher is a terrible thing for an individual. Just as sending your bank details to a Nigerian oil scammer and ending up being ripped off is a terrible thing. And some of these ‘publishers’ are behaving reprehensibly.
But I think we have the right to know the size of the problem. Is this happening to tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of authors? You are asking us as a community to invest time and effort into providing solutions - let’s know how much of a problem it is first. David On 9 Sep 2015, at 13:29, Richard Poynder <ri...@richardpoynder.co.uk<mailto:ri...@richardpoynder.co.uk>> wrote: Hi David, Even if anyone knows the answers to your questions they will not capture the nature and size of the problem of predatory publishing, not least because the way in which these companies extract money from researchers is mutating all the time. For instance, some have started to impose “withdrawal fees”. This means that when a researcher suddenly realises that they have submitted their paper to a publisher they would have been advised not to do business with, or when their institution says that it is not prepared to pay the APC because the publisher is on Beall’s list, then the researcher will want to withdraw it. But when they try to do so they may suddenly discover that their paper is now a hostage. They will be told they must either pay the APC, or pay a withdrawal fee. Since the latter will be lower than the former, this is likely the option they will go for. Clearly, the latter transaction will be invisible, yet the researcher will be out of pocket and the publisher will have increased its revenue, and will as a result be able to grow and expand as a result, and devise new ways of extracting money as it grows. If we are only concerned about how many papers are being published in journals listed by Beall relative to all papers being published then your questions may be good and relevant ones. But if we are concerned about the impact that this activity is having on individuals then I think your questions do not go far enough. For more on this see: http://goo.gl/gybP9G If the above link does not take you directly to the comments I am referring to, they are the last 5 comments below the interview. Richard Poynder From: goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of David Prosser Sent: 09 September 2015 11:25 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal@eprints.org<mailto:goal@eprints.org>> Subject: [GOAL] Re: Predatory Publishing: A Modest Proposal To get an idea of the size of the problem of ‘predatory' publishers, does anybody know: a) the proportion of papers published each year in ‘predatory’ publishers compared to the total number of papers published worldwide; or even b) the proportion of papers published each year in ‘predatory’ publishers compared to the total number of papers published as Gold OA worldwide. If I had to guess, I would say that both proportions are tiny. David On 9 Sep 2015, at 09:42, 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
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