The fenced-off ‘nice’ publication neighbourhoods of Jeffrey Beall | SciELO in Perspective

"Jeffrey Beall, librarian at the Auraria Library of the University of Colorado in Denver, recently published a post on his blog entitled “Is SciELO a Publication Favela?”1 In his blog post, he contrasts the ‘publication favela’ with the ‘nice neighbourhoods for scholarly publications’, the latter being commercial publisher platforms and the former platforms like those of SciELO. We know Beall mainly from his list of ‘predatory’ journals and publishers2,3. That list shows not only a strong bias against open access, but also against any journal or publisher that is owned by or run by non-Anglo-Americans or other non-Westerners. His list contains publishers and journals that have ‘American’ or ‘European’ in their titles, Beall nonetheless seems to associate quality primarily with American and European owned publishers. Cameron Neylon, a much more diplomatic person than I am, expressed it like this on Twitter: “There is [a] definite undercurrent of cultural bias/imperialism, sometimes shading to racism, around ideas of quality in schol[arly] comm[unication]s.”4 And it is not just about quality: by calling the publishers on his list ‘predatory’ he accuses them of unethical behaviour. I am sure there are unethical publishers in his list, but Beall’s definition of ‘predatory’ is peculiar, to say the least. The publishers and journals on his list are exclusively open access ones, as if unethical behaviour, taking payment – or requiring copyright transfer – from authors without offering much of value in return, is the province of open access only. Yet the commercial subscription publishers and their journals that do that are not on Beall’s list ... The ‘nice neighbourhoods’ and ‘favelas’ in Beall’s world do differ in one important respect: exaggerated, and even false, claims of ‘prestige’ are non-existent on the SciELO platform, or at worst very rare; they are rife, on the other hand, in the ‘nice neighbourhoods’ of commercial platforms ..."