Predatory Open Access: Part 1 – A Sting Op and Indictment of the OA Model | Scepticemia

In the last couple of days, an article from Science has literally gone viral in the scientific circles. It is yet another indictment of what Jeffrey Beall has termed as Predatory Open Access. In a series of posts, I shall comment on this issue. In the first post of this series, I talk about briefly regarding the Science article that is making such waves. In the subsequent posts, I shall explore this issue in more depth ... What was damning was that a majority of the open access journals accepted his spoof paper. The authors have shown the tangled web of 'deceit' ... What is especially disheartening is to see the number of dots that land in India. It seems like India has become quite the hotbed for unethical, predatory open access players ... Since Beall’s list came out, there has been much mutterings and whisperings about it in the academic circles since it is difficult to envision a strict set of criteria to adjudge a journal predatory or not. A large segment of his work builds on his experience and hence there is a chance that a few journals that appear unconventional may have been labeled as predatory without being so actually. However, although there can be debate about what goes into calling a journal “predatory”, there is no debate about the fact that his endeavor was sorely needed by the academic fraternity. In an environment where such a travesty is gaining momentum every day, it needed a crusader like Beall to step in and raise the battle cry!  However, not all open access journals are predatory. This bogus article got shot down by PLoS ONE, which is the largest OA journal in the world. It was also rejected by journals from the Hindawi Group, which, once, was included in Beall’s list of predatory publishers. Good for them! Proving their worth for once, at least. PLoS ONE, owing to its size and stature, had come under a lot of fire from the international community since it opened with the approach to publish any study that was scientifically and ethically sound. However, the authors of the spoof article came to realize that they were the ones to provide solid peer review on this article. They not only rejected the article within 2 weeks for poor scientific quality, but also, was the only journal to point out the potential ethical breaches in the article.  So, the impulse to label all open access journals as predatory and money-seeking is strong, but one has to keep in mind that just as in life, there are shades of black and white, with fifty shades of grey in between, in the medical publishing industry as well. The only way to protect oneself from such fraudulent scamsters while, at the same time, promoting open access, is by pushing for quality control in journal recognition. One can stay safe from such predators by sticking to journals that have adopted a “free” open access model, where the running costs of the journal are borne by a recognised and respected scientific body, and the authors are exempt from having to pay to make their articles open access ... The worst part is that the target of these fraudulent publishers are the researchers in the developing world, which sort of justifies why there are so many predatory open access journals coming out of India and Africa ... The best way is to be aware of the show going on. While not everyone may have the guts that Jeffrey Beall has to name and shame big publication houses and label them as “predatory” on a publicly available resource, we all can fight to protect ourselves and our colleagues ..."