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

[Dave Sayers]

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
>

---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list