Predatory Publishers: Why I'll Miss Jeffrey Beall - Neuroskeptic
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-01-26
Summary:
"In my view the demise of Beall’s project is a sad day for science. While his work was sometimes controversial, he was just about the only person who seemed to take predatory publishing seriously and who tried to do something about it.
Predatory publishers are a big problem. They degrade the standards of science by publishing as 'peer reviewed' material that is either poorly reviewed or not peer reviewed at all. They con unsuspecting researchers (often from low-income countries) into paying high fees for an abysmal service, while for unscrupulous authors they offer a way to get dubious material into ‘print’. They blight academics with inane spam. There are hundreds of these outfits, and more appear every day.
So I’m convinced that Jeffrey Beall was fighting the good fight in trying to keep a spotlight on these predators.
On the other hand, I don’t think he should have been doing this job alone. And now that Beall has, apparently, retired from the field, I don’t think any one individual should replace him. Predatory publishing is too big of a topic for one person to deal with.
The one-man nature of Beall’s operation left him open to charges of being arbitrary and opaque in how he decided where to draw the line between legitimate and predatory publishing. I think he made the right calls the vast majority of the time, but then again, he has not been transparent about why he shut down the site.
Therefore, I’d like to see a collective attempt to carry on Beall’s project. I’d love to see a public Wiki dedicated to predatory publishers. Such a Wiki would need moderators, because it would surely be the target of malicious edits by aggreived predators, but there should be a team of moderators rather than just one individual. To avoid conflicts of interest, moderators should have no links to either open access or traditional publishing companies."