Peter Suber - Google+ - +Jeffrey Beall is the target of a dishonest smear campaign.…

"+Jeffrey Beall is the target of a dishonest smear campaign. This is his reward for investigating scam OA journals that give OA a bad name. His work has generated some good-faith disagreement about which journals deserve his criticism. Fair enough. But his work has also triggered some nasty guerrilla counter-attacks. For example, some of his enemies have forged emails in his name pretending to demand money in order to remove publishers from his list of predatory publishers.  http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2012-December/001407.html Some of his enemies have forged emails from others in the OA movement attacking Beall and his work. I know this is happening because someone recently forged an email in my name for just that purpose. https://plus.google.com/109377556796183035206/posts/F1NMirUhAgL These attacks are contemptible.  We should identify scam OA journals, shame them, and advise authors and readers against them. Beall is one of the leaders doing this work and I applaud him for it. +Richard Poynder has done a good deal of this work as well, and has received his share of dishonest attacks. As early as 2008, +Stevan Harnad and I wrote a public letter supporting Poynder's work and condemning the tactics of those trying to silence him. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/joint-statement-in-support-of-richard.html I support this kind of investigative work in part because scam OA journals deceive and defraud scholars. I also support it in order to prevent the stigma created by dishonest OA journals from spreading to the vast majority of honest OA journals.  For some of my own take on scam OA journals, see my 2009 article, 'Ten challenges for open-access journals' (first delivered as a talk to OA journal editors and publishers). Here's an excerpt ..."