Critic of ‘predatory’ publishing returns with scathing message | Ottawa Citizen

"Jeffrey Beall, who was the first to identify and study “predatory” science publishers, is back after a five-month silence, with criticism for universities as well as fake publishers.

Beall, a University of Colorado librarian and researcher, created the widely known Beall’s List of thousands of shady websites that imitate academic journals but publish anything for money.

Then, around New Year, he went silent. His website disappeared and he wouldn’t say why, although associates speculated he was fed up with defending himself against other academics who said he was too critical of the publishing industry.

Now he’s back, and as blunt as ever.

'Over the five years I tracked and listed predatory publishers and journals, those who attacked me the most were other academic librarians. The attacks were often personal and unrelated to the ideas I was sharing or to the discoveries I was making about predatory publishers,' he writes in a commentary.

'Academic librarians constantly attacked me because I dared to point out the weaknesses of the open-access publishing model. Librarianship slavishly follows political correctness and trendiness, so it’s no surprise that the profession fell in line with the open-access social movement and attacked those seeking to tell the truth about it. Many of these librarians were untrue to the faculty at their universities, praising open-access but failing to warn of the traps the predatory publishers were setting.

'So, it’s not only the scholarly publishing industry that needs reform and self-regulation. Academic librarianship needs to wake up to the problem of predatory publishers and be true to library patrons seeking help and advice on scholarly communication.'"