Crowdsourcing a database of “predatory OA journals” « Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week #AcademicSpring

"Its often been noted that under the author-pays model of publication (Gold open access), journals have a financial incentive to publish as many articles as possible so as to collect as many article processing charges as possible. In the early days of PLOS ONE, Nature famously described it as 'relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers'. As the subsequent runaway success of PLOS ONE has shown, that fear was misplaced: real journals will always value their reputation above quick-hit APC income, and that’s reflected by the fact that PLOS ONE papers are cited more often, on average, than those in quality traditional palaeo journals such as JVP and Palaeontology. But the general concern remains a real one: for every PLOS, there is a Bentham Open...  This problem of 'predatory publishers' was highlighted in a Nature column three months ago; and the ethical standard of some of the publishers in question was neatly highlighted as they contributed comments on that column, posing as well-known open-access advocates.  Beall’s list has done sterling work over the last few years, but as the number of open access publishers keeps growing, it’s starting to creak. It’s not really possible for one person to keep track of the entire field. More important, it’s not really desirable for any one person to exercise so much power over the reputation of publishers. For example, the comment trail on the list shows that Hindawi was quite unjustly included for some time, and even now remains on the 'watchlist' despite having a good reputation elsewhere.  We live in a connected and open world, where crowdsourcing has built the world’s greatest encyclopaedia, funded research projects and assembled the best database of resources for solving programming problems. We ought to be able to do better together than any one person can do alone — giving us better coverage, and freeing the resource from the potential of bias, whether intended or unintended...  Cameron had another concern: that it’s hard to build and maintain a blacklist, because the number of predatory publishers is potentially unlimited. There are other reasons to prefer a whitelist — it’s nice to be positive! — and Cameron suggested that the membership of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) might make a good starting point..."