Times Higher Education - Research Intelligence - 'Predators' who lurk in plain cite

When Alastair Harden began receiving emailed invitations earlier this year to submit papers to various similar-sounding open-access journals with what he saw as little obvious relation to his discipline, the PhD student and sessional lecturer in Classics at the University of Reading smelled a rat. Closer examination revealed that the journals were all published by the Centre for Promoting Ideas... A visit to what Mr Harden described as the centre's ‘hilarious’ website... convinced him to contact Times Higher Education. He is not the first to question the centre's credentials. It is among nearly 140 ‘predatory’ publishers and 30 stand-alone journals on a list maintained since 2008 by Jeffrey Beall, associate professor and metadata librarian at the University of Colorado Denver. Dr Beall defines ‘predatory’ journals as publications that ‘exploit the gold open-access model for their own profit’... Many predatory publishers, according to Dr Beall, refer to themselves as ‘centres’, ‘institutes’ or ‘networks’, and are often run by people from the developing world (but who are often living in the West). He said they exploit the fact that academics in some developing nations are judged on the quantity of their research output, which gives them a strong incentive to publish as much as possible regardless of quality. But some countries give academics additional credit for publishing in foreign journals, which explained why so many predatory journals were registered in Western countries such as the UK, the US and Canada, Dr Beall added. Stories abound of academics' names being added to the editorial boards of ‘predatory’ journals without their knowledge. One such victim is Stephen Blamey, fellow by special election in philosophy at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, who is listed as a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, one of the Centre for Promoting Ideas' five journals. ‘I became aware of this when a would-be contributor emailed me,’ he said. ‘He had become suspicious because of a $200 (£127) publication fee that had to be paid into an account in Bangladesh. I'd never even heard of the journal...’ Several recent calls for papers issued by Centre for Promoting Ideas journals claim that they are ‘under the indexing process’ with mainstream bibliographic databases such as Scopus. However, a spokesman for Elsevier, which owns Scopus, said the journals had already been rejected... The editors of some ‘predatory’ journals give every appearance of having been invented. One example is ‘Dr Stephen West’, listed as chief editor of the International Journal of Arts and Commerce, published by the Center for Enhancing Knowledge, UK. He is described as a professor at the University of Glasgow. However, the university does not employ an academic of that name, and Professor West's biography appears to be a word-for-word copy of the website biography of Maurizio Carbone, a (real) professor of international development at Glasgow... Dr Beall has added the Center for Enhancing Knowledge, UK to his list after investigations revealed that its domain name was registered at the address of a money transfer shop in Birmingham, and that several articles on its website were previously published elsewhere... [Beall] said ‘predatory’ journals exposed the downside of the gold model: namely, that it puts publishers at the service of authors rather than readers. This meant that they had less of an incentive to maintain the integrity of the scholarly record than subscription publishers. ‘I am overwhelmed by the amount of plagiarism I see in predatory publishers' journals,’ Dr Beall said... It threatens to bring down the entire system of scholarly communication,’ he warned.. the number of tip-offs Dr Beall receives from academics continues to increase ... he has been adding up to four publishers to his list every week. He is concerned that the volume will increase further still in the wake of the UK government's intention to see all publicly funded papers published under the gold open-access model...”