[lg policy] Beall's List of Predatory Publishers 2017

[Dave Sayers]

Today (3 Jan) saw the release of the latest edition of this excellent free resource, 
on the website 'Scholarly Open Access', maintained voluntarily by Jeffrey Beall, a 
librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver: https://goo.gl/qk2o6W.

The issue of fraud in academic publishing recently made the mainstream news in a New 
York Times article which has been doing the rounds: https://goo.gl/A1G9jI. (Beall is 
quoted in that article.) The rapid increase in fake or otherwise shady publishers is 
alarming and a cause for heightened wariness, especially rise of 'hijacked' 
publications as noted on scholarlyoa.com.

I would add that there's some debate out there about Beall's methods - particularly 
concerns about proficiency in English sometimes being a factor in determining the 
authenticity of a journal. This can potentially cast doubt on journals in countries 
with distinct varieties of English, somewhat unfairly. (The varied debate about his 
methods is captured quite nicely within Beall's Wikipedia entry: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Beall.) Amusingly on that note, the NYT article 
linked above ends with a correction about a typo in another article!

Anyway, in the main, scholarlyoa.com is a very useful resource to help piece together 
the authenticity or otherwise of a publisher/publication, and this year's updated 
List is an essential resource - albeit with the above caveats.

And please, as with so many of these things, if you find it useful yourself then tell 
your grad students and junior colleagues! Too many inexperienced folks get duped by 
obsequious emails from predatory publishers, and they're typically the worst affected 
by the scams, both financially and because usually once you publish with one journal 
you can't publish the same data with another (legitimate) journal.

Happy new year all, stay safe out there!

Dave

--
Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132
Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University | www.shu.ac.uk
Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk
dave.sayers at cantab.net | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers


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