[GOAL] Re: Fwd: Dark Side of Openness: Identity Theft and Fraudulent Postings By Predatory OA Publishers
I tend to agree with Thomas. Of course I appreciate Jeffrey Beals list and his work very much, but we should not forget that predatory publishing is also a practice of toll access publishers - or let's say of publishing itself. And I even think it is more widespread in toll access than in open access as TA is more opaque. Just think of Elseviers fake journals or the fake reviews reported by the chronicle and others. As far as I know some TA publishers start to make OA publishing predatory by pushing submissions that did not make it through the review process of their TA journals into their fee-based OA journals ... which is just a simple trick to make money from papers that did not make it into their TA products and cannot be sold via subscriptions. best regards Ulrich Herb Am 19.12.2012 03:25, schrieb Thomas Krichel: Stevan Harnad writes The research community needs to unite to expose, name and shame these increasingly criminal practices by predatory publishers I wonder if there is a criterion for when a publisher is predatory. bent on making a fast buck by abusing the research community's legitimate desire for open access (OA) (as well as exploiting some researchers' temptation to get accepted for publication fast, no matter what the cost or quality). If the aim open access then we should first expose the toll-gated publishers who have for many years extraordinary profits from material they obtained for free and that was reviewed for them for free. Surely the amounts wasted on open access publishing dwarf the sum spent on library subscriptions to buy access to articles that nobody ever seems to cite, so probably nobody ever reads. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal -- Postfach 10 13 13 D-66013 Saarbrücken http://www.scinoptica.com +49-(0)157 84759877 http://twitter.com/#!/scinoptica ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Further Fallout From Finch Folly
...they [start-up subscription journals, or as Stevan calls them bottom-rung journals] were not subscribed to by institutions if there was no empty subject niche they were filling, nor before they had established their track-records for quality. Where has Stevan been the last 4 decades? The niche for new subscription journals always was (and for new journals in any model probably still is) defined by a surfeit of articles looking for a journal to submit to, not by an empty subject niche. There are sooo many subscription journals occupying the same niche — sometimes partially, but often enough completely — and yet they are all subscribed to, widely or narrowly, but economically sufficiently, on the strength of the adage that you can't afford to miss anything in your discipline. And 'quality' has never been more than a vague and nebulous concept with little predictive value when applied to the vast majority of journals. (Not that I think that matters. Articles of true significance, in whichever journals, mostly drift to the surface anyway. A good, and citable, article in a low Impact Factor journal is not so much dragged down by that low IF, but pushes the IF up, if IFs are what tickle your 'quality' fancy.) In the 'green' scenario, a move to 'gold' is supposed to happen only after everything is 'green' OA and subscriptions are not possible anymore. The then sudden need for OA journals is, in that scenario, only to be satisfied by a veritable avalanche of start-up 'gold' journals, the credibility of which won't be assessable. And they will all feature on Beall's list. How much better to gradually build up a 'gold' OA infrastructure, while suspect new OA journals can be caught, or while Darwinian selection to weed them out can take place. That can be — fortunately, is being — done alongside 'green'. Remember, while 'green' doesn't include 'gold', 'gold' *does* include 'green'. I regard a Darwinian 'weeding' of non-credible journals (including those who Beall classifies as 'predatory') a wholly realistic scenario. Authors submitting to — and paying for — journals without duly checking the journals' credentials are probably too gullible to expect to produce much worthwhile publishable science anyway. It's a harsh world, the scientific one. Jan Velterop On 19 Dec 2012, at 05:51, Stevan Harnad wrote: On 2012-12-18, at 8:26 PM, Roddy Macleod macleod.ro...@gmail.com wrote: Editors with publishing and library experience, available to do the background work, and backed up with scholarly reviewers - sounds OK to me. Please support us in our efforts. We need submissions and we need volunteers to review them in their areas of expertise. Both can be done by registering with Social Sciences Directory as a User. http://www.socialsciencesdirectory.com/index.php/socscidir/article/view/32/69 (1) Is this what was meant by peer review at Heriot-Watt University? (2) Is this how Heriot-Watt University would have assessed whether there is a niche or need for a new peer-reviewed journal? (3) Is this how Heriot-Watt University would have assessed a new journal's quality in deciding whether to subscribe to it? (4) Would Heriot-Watt University consider it OK for journals to be selected (by authors, subscribers, or members) on the basis of their economic model rather than their quality? No question that there are and always were bottom-rung journals among subscription journals too: Difference was that they did not have the extra allure of OA and Gold Fever; they were not subscribed to by institutions if there was no empty subject niche they were filling, nor before they had established their track-records for quality. And journals could not cover their start-up costs by tempting authors to publish with them by paying for it, again seasoned with the extra allure of OA and Gold Fever, and perhaps of quick and easy acceptance for publication. (Needy start-up subscription journals lowering quality standards to fill the need for submissions would simply reduce their chances of getting subscriptions -- but this does not necessarily lower the chances of tempting needy authors to pay-to-publish in OA start-up journals -- and especially before the journal's quality record is established, when all a fool's gold start-up needs for legitimacy is to wrap itself in the mantle of OA and righteous indignation against the tyranny of the impact factor unfairly favouring established journals…) As I have said many times, institutions are free to part themselves from their spare money in any way they like. But if they claim they're doing it for the sake of OA, they had better mandate Green OA (effectively) first -- otherwise (as long as they are double-paying, over and above their uncancelable subscriptions) they are in the iron pyrite market. (And encouraging this, blindly, is one of the perverse effects of Finch Folly.)
[GOAL] Re: Further Fallout From Finch Folly
a. I agree with Jan Velterop that the Fools-Gold Junk-Journal start-ups are not a major problem and will be weeded out with time. b. I even agree that authors (and referees) that fall for journal scam get what they deserve, and perhaps learn a useful lesson from it. c. I also agree that the minority of research that is of maximal importance makes it to the top no matter what. But Jan is completely mistaken about the Green-to-Gold transition scenario. It is not, as he implies, (1) globally mandated Green, followed by (2) subscription collapse, followed by (3) an avalanche of Gold start-ups (and hence the Beall situation): The Green-to Gold transition scenariohttp://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/is a conversion of the *established subscription journals* to Gold (3) under subscription cancelation pressure (2) from globally mandated Green (1). That's the only way to get journals to cut costs by downsizing to just the post-Green essentials (no-fault peer reviewhttp://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/harnad/07harnad.html). And that's why *globally mandated Green must come first*. Jan's preferred scenario of a publisher-controlled direct transition to pre-emptive Gold (whether via hybrids or start-ups), without the downsizing pressure from Green, will not only take extremely longhttp://openaccess.eprints.org/uploads/bjorkspring.png, but will retain the bloated inessentials and their costs. And during this lengthy transition, while subscriptions still need to be sustained by institutions (because everything is not available as Green OA), double-payment (for subscriptions to input and publishing fees for output), aside from slowing the transition, will even add to the bloat. *Stevan Harnad* On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 5:21 AM, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.com wrote: ...they [start-up subscription journals, or as Stevan calls them bottom-rung journals] were not subscribed to by institutions if there was no empty subject niche they were filling, nor before they had established their track-records for quality. Where has Stevan been the last 4 decades? The niche for new subscription journals always was (and for new journals in any model probably still is) defined by a surfeit of articles looking for a journal to submit to, not by an empty subject niche. There are sooo many subscription journals occupying the same niche — sometimes partially, but often enough completely — and yet they are all subscribed to, widely or narrowly, but economically sufficiently, on the strength of the adage that you can't afford to miss anything in your discipline. And 'quality' has never been more than a vague and nebulous concept with little predictive value when applied to the vast majority of journals. (Not that I think that matters. Articles of true significance, in whichever journals, mostly drift to the surface anyway. A good, and citable, article in a low Impact Factor journal is not so much dragged down by that low IF, but pushes the IF up, if IFs are what tickle your 'quality' fancy.) In the 'green' scenario, a move to 'gold' is supposed to happen only after everything is 'green' OA and subscriptions are not possible anymore. The then sudden need for OA journals is, in that scenario, only to be satisfied by a veritable avalanche of start-up 'gold' journals, the credibility of which won't be assessable. And they will all feature on Beall's list. How much better to gradually build up a 'gold' OA infrastructure, while suspect new OA journals can be caught, or while Darwinian selection to weed them out can take place. That can be — fortunately, is being — done alongside 'green'. Remember, while 'green' doesn't include 'gold', 'gold' *does* include 'green'. I regard a Darwinian 'weeding' of non-credible journals (including those who Beall classifies as 'predatory') a wholly realistic scenario. Authors submitting to — and paying for — journals without duly checking the journals' credentials are probably too gullible to expect to produce much worthwhile publishable science anyway. It's a harsh world, the scientific one. Jan Velterop On 19 Dec 2012, at 05:51, Stevan Harnad wrote: On 2012-12-18, at 8:26 PM, Roddy Macleod macleod.ro...@gmail.com wrote: *Editors with publishing and library experience, available to do the background work, and backed up with scholarly reviewers - sounds OK to me. * Please support us in our efforts. We need submissions and we need volunteers to review them in their areas of expertise. Both can be done by registering with Social Sciences Directory as a User. http://www.socialsciencesdirectory.com/index.php/socscidir/article/view/32/69 (1) Is this what was meant by peer review at Heriot-Watt University? (2) Is this how Heriot-Watt University would have assessed whether there is a niche or need for a new peer-reviewed journal? (3) Is this how Heriot-Watt University would have assessed a new journal's quality in deciding whether to subscribe to
[GOAL] Re: Dark Side of Openness: Identity Theft and Fraudulent Postings By Predatory OA Publishers
There is no question but that there are junk subscription journals, just as there are junk OA journals. But it does not help -- and only compounds confusion -- to conflate the opportunistic practices of established subscription publishers with the predatory practices of the growing spate of fools-gold startup journals. There has never been an opportunity like this before. Subscription junk journals still had to create enough of a multi-institutional subscription demand to sustain themselves. Fools gold need merely keep bilking naive and needy individual authors, article by article, with no more investment than a website and spam ware. And eventual collapse is no threat: You just pocket the loot made to date and start up another journal. Nothing is gained by treating all publishers as a downward continuum of scoundrels. It's not true; it's not fair; and all it does is vent a personally gratifying animus instead of contributing toward any realistic or practical progress. Stevan Harnad On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 4:11 AM, Ulrich Herb u.h...@scinoptica.com wrote: I tend to agree with Thomas. Of course I appreciate Jeffrey Beals list and his work very much, but we should not forget that predatory publishing is also a practice of toll access publishers - or let's say of publishing itself. And I even think it is more widespread in toll access than in open access as TA is more opaque. Just think of Elseviers fake journals or the fake reviews reported by the chronicle and others. As far as I know some TA publishers start to make OA publishing predatory by pushing submissions that did not make it through the review process of their TA journals into their fee-based OA journals ... which is just a simple trick to make money from papers that did not make it into their TA products and cannot be sold via subscriptions. best regards Ulrich Herb Am 19.12.2012 03:25, schrieb Thomas Krichel: Stevan Harnad writes The research community needs to unite to expose, name and shame these increasingly criminal practices by predatory publishers I wonder if there is a criterion for when a publisher is predatory. bent on making a fast buck by abusing the research community's legitimate desire for open access (OA) (as well as exploiting some researchers' temptation to get accepted for publication fast, no matter what the cost or quality). If the aim open access then we should first expose the toll-gated publishers who have for many years extraordinary profits from material they obtained for free and that was reviewed for them for free. Surely the amounts wasted on open access publishing dwarf the sum spent on library subscriptions to buy access to articles that nobody ever seems to cite, so probably nobody ever reads. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal -- Postfach 10 13 13 D-66013 Saarbrücken http://www.scinoptica.com +49-(0)157 84759877 http://twitter.com/#!/scinoptica ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] December issue of ScieCom info
[Apologies for cross-postings] Welcome to the December 2012 issue of ScieCom info. Nordic - Baltic Forum for Scientific Communication. --- TABLE OF CONTENTS News Two new publication funds established in Norway during the last few days. More info herehttp://nile.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5770. DOAJ: Newhttp://nile.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5768 agreement regarding management of the Directory of Open Access Journals. DOAJ: Lars Bjørnshauge Managing Director of the Directory of Open Access Journals. More info herehttp://nile.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5771. Coming events Book the date for Mötesplats Open Access (Meeting Place Open Access) 17-18 April 2013 at the School of Business, Gothenburg University. The 17th International Conference on Electronic Publishing - “Mining the Digital Information Networks” will be held June 13-14, 2013 at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden. The main theme will be extracting and processing data from the vast wealth of digital publishing and the ways to use and reuse this information in innovative social contexts in a sustainable way Articles In this last issue for 2012 we start with the recent positive OA-developments in Sweden and concludes with an international perspective on what stakeholders have to do to realize the potential of OA. These two overviews are complemented by a report on recent trends presented at the recent 7th Munin conference in Tromsø, and two articles discussing the important problems of author identification * Ulf Kronman: “Open Access in Sweden - going from why to howhttp://nile.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5766/4962“ The author is coordinator of the programme OpenAccess.se at the National Library of Sweden. He looks at the remarkable international advances toward OA during 2012. His perspective includes the recent Swedish governmental research bill, commissioning the Swedish Research Council to coordinate the conditions for OA to research results and data among the Swedish research funders in cooperation with the Swedish Association for Higher Education and the National Library of Sweden * Gudmundur A. Thorisson:“ Persistent, unique identifiers for authors – ORCID and smaller publishershttp://nile.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5769/4964” The author belongs to the Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Iceland and has been involved with the ORCID project for three years. He describes the recent launch of its central registry service for scholarly authors and contributors. This service makes it possible for researchers to obtain a unique, persistent personal identifier and to maintain a centralized record of their published works, grants and other scholarly activities. He discusses what this means for small, independent journal operations like ScieCom. * Adrian Price: “Author identification in Denmark: ORCID and repositorieshttp://nile.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5767/4963“ The author comes from The Faculty of Life Sciences Library at the University of Copenhagen and he takes the ORCID project to Denmark. All Danish universities register their research publications in their local Pure-repositories. The quality of the registered data is important, and a central issue is the correct identification of a researcher, his/her organisation and publications. How can ORCID solve this problem? * Emma Margret Skåden: ”The 7th Annual Munin Conference on Scientific Publishing 2012 – New Trends.http://nile.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5765/4961” The author is Adviser at the University Library in Tromsø, Norway and her report from their annual Munin conference on scholarly and scientific publishing gives an overview of what is happening in this field. The focus of this year was new trends in scholarly publishing. For the first time a publisher session was organized. * Lars Bjørnshauge: “What it takes for the stakeholders involved to facilitate the full potential of open access to unfold!.http://nile.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5764/4960” As SPARC´s Director of European Library Relations and recently appointed Managing Director of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) Lars Bjørnshauge – as Ulf Kronman – points out the growing acceptance of OA among important national and supranational stakeholders. But eve if they realize the importance of OA for both research and society, they falter when it comes to implementation and its problem. According to the author, the reason for all these vacillations in spite of signing declarations is that research is financed but publishing is not. The research community has outsourced the publishing of results to a market lacking competition. We hope that you will have a god read. Your comments and ideas are
[GOAL] Re: Further Fallout From Finch Folly
Re: There are sooo many subscription journals occupying the same niche - sometimes partially, but often enough completely - and yet they are all subscribed to, widely or narrowly, but economically sufficiently, on the strength of the adage that you can't afford to miss anything in your discipline. Are many of the new commercial journals actually 'subscribed to' or are they added to existing packages in hopes they will capture sufficient market share to continue? ... my assumption is that the concept of 'loss leaders' is NOT operable for society published journals. Dana L. Roth Millikan Library / Caltech 1-32 1200 E. California Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91125 626-395-6423 fax 626-792-7540 dzr...@library.caltech.edumailto:dzr...@library.caltech.edu http://library.caltech.edu/collections/chemistry.htm From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jan Velterop Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2012 2:21 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum Subject: [GOAL] Re: Further Fallout From Finch Folly ...they [start-up subscription journals, or as Stevan calls them bottom-rung journals] were not subscribed to by institutions if there was no empty subject niche they were filling, nor before they had established their track-records for quality. Where has Stevan been the last 4 decades? The niche for new subscription journals always was (and for new journals in any model probably still is) defined by a surfeit of articles looking for a journal to submit to, not by an empty subject niche. There are sooo many subscription journals occupying the same niche - sometimes partially, but often enough completely - and yet they are all subscribed to, widely or narrowly, but economically sufficiently, on the strength of the adage that you can't afford to miss anything in your discipline. And 'quality' has never been more than a vague and nebulous concept with little predictive value when applied to the vast majority of journals. (Not that I think that matters. Articles of true significance, in whichever journals, mostly drift to the surface anyway. A good, and citable, article in a low Impact Factor journal is not so much dragged down by that low IF, but pushes the IF up, if IFs are what tickle your 'quality' fancy.) In the 'green' scenario, a move to 'gold' is supposed to happen only after everything is 'green' OA and subscriptions are not possible anymore. The then sudden need for OA journals is, in that scenario, only to be satisfied by a veritable avalanche of start-up 'gold' journals, the credibility of which won't be assessable. And they will all feature on Beall's list. How much better to gradually build up a 'gold' OA infrastructure, while suspect new OA journals can be caught, or while Darwinian selection to weed them out can take place. That can be - fortunately, is being - done alongside 'green'. Remember, while 'green' doesn't include 'gold', 'gold' *does* include 'green'. I regard a Darwinian 'weeding' of non-credible journals (including those who Beall classifies as 'predatory') a wholly realistic scenario. Authors submitting to - and paying for - journals without duly checking the journals' credentials are probably too gullible to expect to produce much worthwhile publishable science anyway. It's a harsh world, the scientific one. Jan Velterop ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Further Fallout From Finch Folly
Are many of the new commercial journals actually �subscribed to� or are they added to existing packages in hopes they will capture sufficient market share to continue? � my assumption is that the concept of loss leaders is NOT operable for society published journals. While I don't think many societies consider loss leading with one or more journals, I do think there are journals suported by scholarly societies that do not directly cover their costs. It all depends on the society. The ACM is IMHO one of the better societies on OA, though I would still like to push it further and more quickly and will do so as opportunity arises - they've just compelted a major move on OA and the publications board seem unwilling to entertain new ideas before the current one beds in. They do not require each and every publication to directly cover its own costs in subscriptions, or even in usage in their digital library. As a non-prifit with an elected publications board while the society seeks to maintain proper operating budget controls they also cross-subsidise operations and do not try to allocate fixed central costs evenly or even pro-rated to all publications. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
