Defending Regional Excellence in Research or Why Beall is Wrong About SciELO | The Scholarly Kitchen

" ... Jeffrey Beall wrote a commentary on the South American aggregator and citation index, SciELO. There was quite a bit of anger particularly among open access (OA) advocates in response to the post, much of it expressed on Twitter. Many pointed to Beall’s culturally charged use of the word 'favela' to describe SciELO, with some accusing Beall of being classist or derogatory. The word racism was used, albeit quite parenthetically. Some responses relied on arguments of unfairness and lack of transparency in Beall’s eponymous list, which isn’t really relevant here. It’s important to remember that Beall did not call SciELO predatory. I’m sure that he would concede that SciELO are a legitimate and reputable publisher. Instead, Beall contended that SciELO was a bad place for scholars to put their work ... In other words, since SciELO isn’t as well known in the US and Canada as are other publishers, nobody’s going to read it and it’s a bad place to publish. That’s a pretty tough point of view to defend. To support it, Beall claims that SciELO isn’t indexed in Web of Science or Scopus. He conceded that you could find the work in Google Scholar, but contends that the search engine is, 'poisoned by fringe science' and so scholars won’t find SciELO’s content that way. The message here is that publishing with nationally run or regional publishers is not in the best interests of local researchers. There’s a few levels of wrong going on, but even if you agree with the value judgements being made, Beall’s argument would be flawed simply because the supporting evidence is incorrect ..."