Predatory journals and researcher needs - Smart - 2017 - Learned Publishing - Wiley Online Library

"The discussions around predatory publishers have changed somewhat in the past month or two; coinciding with, or perhaps generated by, the demise of Beall's list of potential, possible, or probable predatory publishers. For anyone unfamiliar with Jeffrey Beall, he is a Professor at University of Colorado Denver, and has run a personal website since 2008 naming and shaming journals and publishers that he deemed to be operating in a dodgy fashion. The site was taken down in January of this year, with much speculation as to the reason. (Retraction Watch reports that he simply decided to discontinue it: http://retractionwatch.com/2017/01/17/bealls-list-potential-predatory-publishers-go-dark/.)

The closure of the website led to several discussions on the ListServs starting with a suggestion that someone else should step into the space and issue a blacklist of publishers – a suggestion that was condemned by Cameron Neylon on his blog posting ‘Blacklists are technically infeasible, practically unreliable and unethical. Period’ (Neylon, 2017).

Since then the discussion has opened up to ask why so many authors use journals that we, the western publishing elite, consider harmful to scholarly communication? It is a good question, and reveals a potential challenge to the way that our journal ecosystem has developed in the past 40 (or more?) years. What it has revealed is that there is a large and prolific group of researchers who cannot be accommodated by the relatively small number of western-published journals. The reason for their exclusion may be quality or relevance issues, but regardless of value judgements, the fact that there is such a large cohort of researchers wanting (or needing) to publish their results is a factor that we cannot ignore. The fact that these researchers are being offered a model where the money comes from the author, not the reader, also reveals a different business dynamic. In many of the emerging economies, journal publishing is supported by university or other subsidies and although paying for print is accepted, online publication is assumed to be freely available to all. This has been evidenced in several reports where there is a conflation between online publishing and open access (OA; for example in Murray & Clobridge, 2014). Few commercial publishers in these regions have traditionally worked in the journal market, believing that there is little money in the subscription model – but now they seem to have found a commercially successful model in the author pay system."