Beall's list and what we need to replace it. | Science 2.0

"The real probelms with Beall's list.  It seemed a bit arbitrary.

You know who else allows this...Scientific Research Publishing a journal which was put on Beall's list as being predatory and not having real peer reivew which I knew was unfair.  I published there as a broke graduate student.  They gave me a steep discount in exchange for reviewing a few papers.  The papers I said to reject were rejected the papers I said to accept were accepted. My own publication was underreview for about nine months and "in press" for a few while I came up with the money to pay them.  (That publication has since been cited in research in a "real" journal and according to NASA ADS read hundreds of times.  Where something is published matters for a year.  How it is used afterwards matters for eternity.)  If they were predatory it would have been all about getting the full ammount of their money.  Why was SCRIP predatory while Nature Sci Rep isn't for doing the same thing and charging more money? Science Open and The Winnower were not on his list ... Beall even has an account on The Winnower.  That was an example of all the problems with Beall's list.  It was open to question and could seem personal.

There is the alleged racism I won't get into that.  It may be in the final analysis that journals in non -English speaking countries including on his list society journals of those countries was 100% legit.

In my opinion, Beall was guilty of a common and accepted academic classism.   This classism says  only those who have grant funded or endowed research or who are employed where they can get their job to pay a $25,000 fee should bother with publishing OA.  That same line of thought says, everyone else should publish in paywalled journals and maybe not even use scholarly archives like the physics arXiv.  Those who think that way say this when it comes to access.. 'such does not cause a problem since all real scholars will have access to a university library by just taking a course of no consequence at their local college'.  ( I have seen such words from those who run scholarly journals though the name escapes me)."