Predatory journals and researcher needs

What to us is predatory may simply be a new model The discussions around predatory publishers have changed somewhat in the past month or two; coinciding with, or perhaps generated by, the demise of Beall's list of potential, possible, or probable predatory publishers. For anyone unfamiliar with Jeffrey Beall, he is a Professor at University of Colorado Denver, and has run a personal website since 2008 naming and shaming journals and publishers that he deemed to be operating in a dodgy fashion. The site was taken down in January of this year, with much speculation as to the reason. (Retraction Watch reports that he simply decided to discontinue it: http://retractionwatch.com/2017/01/17/bealls-list-potential-predatory-publishers-go-dark/.) The closure of the website led to several discussions on the ListServs starting with a suggestion that someone else should step into the space and issue a blacklist of publishers – a suggestion that was condemned by Cameron Neylon on his blog posting ‘Blacklists are technically infeasible, practically unreliable and unethical. Period’ (Neylon, 2017). Since then the discussion has opened up to ask why so many authors use journals that we, the western publishing elite, consider harmful to scholarly communication? It is a good question, and reveals a potential challenge to the way that our journal ecosystem has developed in the past 40 (or more?) years. What it has revealed is that there is a large and prolific group of researchers who cannot be accommodated by the relatively small number of western-published journals. The reason for their exclusion may be quality or relevance issues, but regardless of value judgements, the fact that there is such a large cohort of researchers wanting (or needing) to publish their results is a factor that we cannot ignore. The fact that these researchers are being offered a model where the money comes from the author, not the reader, also reveals a different business dynamic. In many of the emerging economies, journal publishing is supported by university or other subsidies and although paying for print is accepted, online publication is assumed to be freely available to all. This has been evidenced in several reports where there is a conflation between online publishing and open access (OA; for example in Murray & Clobridge, 2014). Few commercial publishers in these regions have traditionally worked in the journal market, believing that there is little money in the subscription model – but now they seem to have found a commercially successful model in the author pay system. A particularly active discussion on this topic has been taking place on the OSI ListServ. (The Open Scholarship Initiative was launched last year as a series of conferences and ongoing discussions about the nature of scholarship and where it should be going into the future: http://osinitiative.org/about-osi/.) What the discussions have revealed is that whilst individuals may strive to be open-minded, we are deeply entrenched in the high-quality model of scientific journals, and consider the intrusion of new players who do not follow the rules to be harmful to all. This has frequently led to a generalization that poor quality publishing operations are, by definition, fraudulent. If we are to engage with the increase in (legal) publishing outlets, then we need to set straight our own biases and opinions. David Wojick (from Inside Public Access) wrote on the OSI ListServ ‘everywhere I look I see people assuming that every one of the 10,000 to 20,000 journals on Beall's list is predatory and this somehow makes everything they publish worthless… These journals are providing an outlet for a million low income LMIC researchers who probably could not publish otherwise’ (OSI ListServ, 4 March, quoted with permission). This is a fact that has been endorsed by the recent De Gruyter survey of authors which found that those based in nations ‘from the periphery’ were more likely to publish in Gold OA journals and pay the APCs themselves than those in better funded research centres in the ‘core’ countries. However, the amount paid and the journal venues used showed two very different publishing landscapes (see the article by Witold Kieńć in this issue, 2017). Also in this mix are the forces coming from academia which affect the why's and where's of author publishing habits. Unfortunately, the discussion of predatory publishers often focuses entirely on the publishers and ignores what is happening in international academia that forces publication of more articles, resulting in a market opening for new publishing outlets. This influence is clearly articulated in the Nature commentary, ‘The pressure to publish pushes down quality’ (Sarewitz, 2016). Whilst in several countries there are high rewards for being published in high impact journals, there is often a general pressure to publish (anywhere) and a lack of fluent English language precludes many researchers from being accepted in western journals (see Paiva et al., 2017). There is, rightly, a concern that if low-quality or fraudulent research becomes readily available (similar to ‘fake news’) this will be detrimental to research globally, and there is certainly a risk of this where researchers only have access to such information. However, we need only look back 20 years when use of digital journals was not as widespread as now and most developing country researchers relied on out-of-date printed materials in their institutional library. The fact that there is now a wealth of good (as well as bad) content available to them must only be beneficial. And are we right to assume that researchers are unable to determine what is good and what is bad? And to assume that only ‘credible’ journals publish high quality papers, and what is published elsewhere is rubbish? To prove my point, I would point to the Popeye conundrum (which my husband still believes) where the iron content of spinach has been misrepresented, debunked, reinforced, and repeated again since its initial public release in ca. 1890 (see Kent Anderson's blog on Scholarly Kitchen, 2014). I also refer to Retraction Watch for the regular updates of mistaken, fraudulent and ‘crappy science’ being published, consumed, and cited. I think that we have to accept that enforcing the western journal business and operational model on the world is not feasible — and may not be scalable in the long term. We need to look more to education and less to criticism. This was put perfectly by Liz Wager in her recent article, ‘Why we should worry less about predatory publishers and more about the quality of research and training at our academic institutions’ (Wager, 2017). I couldn't say it better myself. Pippa Smart