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

Wed Jan 25 11:06:52 UTC 2017

Below is the latest soliciting email I've received. In the absence of Beall's list, I 
thought it would be worth sharing some general remarks about why some journals can 
come across as questionable, and what to bear in mind as a general rule when thinking 
about your submissions.

Some things that ring alarm bells in the email below:
- It's clearly a cut-paste email just including the title of a conference paper I had 
online.
- The Editor-in-Chief is given a name, Man-Sik Lee, but not a university affiliation.
- The journal website www.hrpub.org/journals/jour_guidelines.php?id=93 does give 
Man-Sik Lee's affiliation, 'Gachon University, Korea', but a site-specific Google 
search of that university's website brings up only three results, none of which is a 
staff profile: https://goo.gl/j3i91t.
- The domain in the email address, horizon-publishing.org, is different from the 
website. That's not necessarily suspect, but going to www.horizon-publishing.org in a 
web browser just brings up a domain holding page. This seems sloppy. If you're going 
to use a different domain for your email addresses, at least get the URL to redirect 
to your actual website.
- The journal web page seems neat and clearly arranged, but the online submission 
system does not use a secure HTTPS login page.

Now, I have *nothing* to say about whether this journal is legitimate or not, but at 
best it comes across as poorly run and lacking in credentials. Any researcher, 
especially at an early career stage, should be aiming for journals that have very 
easily verifiable credentials and do not come across as questionable at all.

More generally, the most important opinion comes from the people you want to impress. 
Are you seeking academic work and want to impress prospective employers? If so then 
ask senior academics who sit on appointment committees what they would make of a 
given journal. Are you looking for work in a particular professional sector? 
Similarly, ask senior people in that field who decide on appointments whether a given 
journal would impress them.

JUST REMEMBER, once you publish a set of data and/or analysis in one journal, it's 
TRAPPED there. In most cases, copyright means you can't take the same work (or work 
derived from the same data) elsewhere. Even without copyright concerns, prestigious 
journals simply don't want stuff that's been published elsewhere. They want 
exclusivity. That's the biggest reason for caution here, much more important 
long-term than just being scammed out of some money for bogus publishing fees.

The soliciting email is as follows:

=================================
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	The publication for your paper in Linguistics and Literature Studies, Vol5 
No3 (ISSN: 2331-6438)
Date: 	24/01/2017 23:32
From: 	Nicholas Wilson, <conference at horizon-publishing.org>
To: 	d.sayers at shu.ac.uk <d.sayers at shu.ac.uk>

Dear Dr. Dave Sayers,

Linguistics and Literature Studies(Editor-in-Chief: Prof. Man-Sik Lee) is an 
international, open access, peer reviewed journal. Till now, 5 volumes including 24 
issues have been published. This journal has been indexed by some bibliographic 
databases (e.g. Linguistics Abstracts Online, ProQuest, Index Copernicus, EBSCO 
A-to-Z etc). We read the abstract of your article entitled Reviving 'applied 
sociolinguistics and are very interested in your article presented in 2016 Sheffield 
Hallam University Conference on Languages and Culturesin 21st-Century 
Transnationality. If the full text was not published, please send us an extended 
version for publication in Linguistics and Literature Studies(ISSN: 2331-6438) via 
email at conference at horizon-publishing.org.

For more information, please visit journal's homepage.
Guidelines: www.hrpub.org/journals/jour_guidelines.php?id=93

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best Regards

Nicholas Wilson
Editorial Assistant
conference at horizon-publishing.org
Editorial Board of Linguistics and Literature Studies
=================================

Be safe out there folks!

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

On 19/01/2017 12:43, Dave Sayers wrote:
> As if I cursed it with my email, sadly this excellent resource has just folded -
> apparently under legal pressure: https://goo.gl/1i2HP7.
>
> As the top comment points out, the website has been cached elsewhere and the latest
> version (15 Jan) is available on the Internet Archive, here: https://goo.gl/HannC1.
> Of course it won't be updated though, and with predatory journals being such a
> rapidly growing field, it will be of increasingly limited value, sadly.
>
> As another comment points out, you can approach the question of legitimacy from the
> other direction and see if a journal is recognised in a directory like DOAJ or SCOPUS
> - although as Beall noted on a number of occasions, these have had to remove
> publishers for misconduct, so membership there doesn't guarantee legitimacy.
>
> For what it's worth, my basic advice is that the right journal/conference will not
> come to you; they will wait for you to come to them. Predatory journals seem to have
> in common the trait of soliciting for contributions, usually out of the blue, often
> with vaguely worded obsequious praise for your work. All these things should ring
> loud alarm bells. This advice is easier to impart than Beall's list, and hopefully
> less likely to get me sued. Please pass it on!
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
> On 03/01/2017 19:08, Dave Sayers wrote:
>> 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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