Cites & Insights -- Journals, “Journals” and Wannabes: Investigating The List
abernard102@gmail.com 2014-06-11
Summary:
Use the link to access the full text article published in Cites & Insights. The article opens as follows: "The Directory of Open Access Journals (doaj.org) includes 9,822 journals as of June 8, 2014. If you expand Jeffrey Beall’s 2014 list of “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers“ (as downloaded in late March or early April 2014) and add his 2014 list of 'potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals' that aren’t from a publisher on the previous list (again as downloaded in late March or early April 2014), you’ll come up with 9,219 journals. Or at least I did.
Wow! 9,219 is 93.9% of 9,822. No wonder Beall’s been known to suggest that there aren’t very many honest OA publishers.
Except for one thing. Well, many things—thus, this issue-length essay—but just for starters, there’s this: Even taking Beall’s 'predatory' judgments at face value, his list includes only 904 of the 9,822 journals in DOAJ—about 9.2%. Which, using his criteria, means that 90.8% of serious Gold OA journals—the overwhelming majority—are above suspicion. The vast majority of Gold OA journals are just fine. While I’m inclined to believe the last sentence is true—the vast majority of Gold OA journals are legitimate, with honest peer review and intended to make scholarship broadly available—it’s no more clearly
implied by what precedes it than is the ludicrous countersuggestion (that is, that because Beall finds 9,219 journals to be questionable and there are 9,822 journals in DOAJ, only a few hundred Gold OA journals appear to be honest) ..."