Signs of divisiveness, discrimination and stigmatization caused by Jeffrey Beall's “predatory” open access publishing blacklists and philosophy

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Abstract

Jeffrey Beall, a US librarian, coined the term “predatory publishing” specifically to describe a movement or phenomenon of open access (OA) journals and publishers that he and others believed displayed exploitative and unscholarly principles. Using a blog to transmit those ideas, and profiling specific cases using blacklists, one of the most polemic aspects of Beall's blog was its tendency to attract and incite academic radicalism. Beall targeted both publishers and standalone journals, but how he precisely determined that an OA journal or a publisher was predatory was in many cases an ambiguity. Beall's deficient and highly subjective criteria, as well as those blacklists' incapacity to clearly distinguish low quality OA publishers from predatory ones, may have negatively impacted the operations of several Beall-blacklisted OA journals and publishers. Freedom of speech that embraces prejudice, via Beall's blog, and the establishment of “predatory” blacklists, are enhanced discriminatory ideologies that continue to be carried downstream from Beall to and by other like-minded individuals and groups who proliferate academic divisiveness and may also be formalizing and institutionalizing a culture of discriminative philosophies by cloning Beall's blacklists and encouraging their continued use.

Introduction

One of the adverse consequences of the tremendous growth of scholarly open access (OA) publishing funded by article processing charges, is the rise of “predatory” publishers and journals (Al-Khatib, 2016). Jeffrey Beall, a scholarly communications librarian who retired from the University of Colorado (UoC) at Denver Auraria Library, Colorado (USA) in 2018, is credited for coining the term “predatory publishing” (Beall, 2010a, Beall, 2010b). As the architect of this term, Beall used the term “predatory” to refer to a group of OA publishers and journals that he personally believed abused OA publishing practices for their own monetary gain. Broadly, predatory OA publishers are known for aggressively soliciting academics with requests for manuscript submissions, reviews and editorial board services, creating negative publicity for legitimate OA journals (Macháček & Srholec, 2021).

Beall maintained two blacklists of individual (stand-alone) OA journals and publishers from 2012 to January of 2017 that he selected and characterized as “potential, possible, or probable predatory”, which are broad and unspecific terms. Those blacklists were maintained on his now defunct blog.1 That blog offered a personal perspective and crude alert system for academics to exercise caution when selecting their venue for publication, and was certainly instrumental in raising academics' awareness of the issue of predatory OA publishing around the globe. No doubt boosted by popularity, Beall initiated two blacklists that named and shamed OA publishers and stand-alone journals, even though most of them (>85%) were empty shells, i.e., journals that had registered eISSNs, but had yet to publish any content (Crawford, 2016), an unfortunate fate that can await any newly launched journals of even legitimate leading for-profit publishers (Teixeira da Silva, Dobránszki, et al., 2019).

Beall's blacklists had many critical shortcomings, including that they were incomplete, they failed to consider that non-OA journals could also be predatory (Olivarez et al., 2018), their inclusion of actual or possible false entries that typify blacklists caused by broad and unspecified criteria for each blacklisted entry, as well as the lack of detailed criteria for each blacklisted OA journal and publisher (Teixeira da Silva and Tsigaris, 2018, Teixeira da Silva and Tsigaris, 2020; Tsigaris & Teixeira da Silva, 2021). This led Beall to erroneously blacklist some potentially legitimate journals and publishers, particularly those from low and middle income countries (LMICs) (Crawford, 2016), which may have been struggling start-up operations without the massive resources available to them that the larger and more established for-profit publishers had. Journals that had little or no geographic diversity on their editorial boards and those that had not been listed in standard or local periodical directories or library databases, common limitations for journals in LMICs such as those in Africa that struggle to compete in the OA academic and financial markets (Teixeira da Silva, Adjei, et al., 2019), were also blacklisted, possibly resulting in some of them ceasing publishing operations as a result of that negative profiling (Laine & Winker, 2017). Many of Beall's criteria were called out as unfair and/or discriminatory by scholars around the world (Berger & Cirasella, 2015).

Most often, “predatory” journals and publishers are accused of publishing with no (or frivolous) peer review, but this blanket condemnation has also been found to be inaccurate and unfair (Cobey et al., 2019), also because peer review, or its quality, cannot be verified in “legitimate” journals that were not on Beall's blacklists, i.e., in so-called whitelisted journals. Cobey et al. (2019) surveyed a geographically diverse group of biomedical researchers about their motivations and experiences of submitting to, and publishing in, presumed predatory journals, relying exclusively on Beall-blacklisted OA journals, and made some striking findings. They found that the vast majority of participants reported receiving peer review feedback that they found to be substantive and useful in nature. This contradicts the strongly held (and loudly claimed) belief that predatory OA journals generally do not provide peer review and that, if they do, it is frivolous and/or minimal and does not add to the scientific quality or integrity of an article. Those findings indicate that OA journals condemned by Beall as being predatory may indeed be legitimate scholarly journals. Cobey et al. (2019) identified the following factors as some of the major reasons influencing researchers' decisions to submit articles to “predatory” publishers: academic and professional factors (e.g., publishing pressure from universities, for tenure), factors related to the journal (e.g., fit of paper with journal, perceptions of quality), factors related to the paper published (e.g., difficulty in publishing elsewhere due to low research originality, previous rejections), desire to disseminate research, invitation from the journal, and recommendation from a colleague or personal factors (e.g., lack of mentorship, lack of knowledge, personal motivations to publish). Many of those reasons are fair and scholarly reasons for seeking optional publishing venues, but the survey's methodology itself was flawed because a priori it made respondents believe that their selection of journal was unscholarly simply because it was based exclusively on Beall-blacklisted OA journals.

There have been other attempts to identify predatory journals and to blacklisting them besides efforts made by Beall. After Beall's blog and blacklists were pulled down on January 15, 2017, Cabell International established another set of criteria to identify “predatory” journals, but access to those lists requires a subscription (Teixeira da Silva, 2020a). Cabell currently uses over 60 indicators spread out across eight categories: integrity; peer review; website, publication practices; indexing and metrics; fees; access and copyright; and business practices (Dony et al., 2020). Dony et al. (2020) tested Cabell's blacklist to analyse whether or not it could be adopted as a reliable tool by stakeholders in scholarly communication, including academic libraries, and concluded that poor-quality journals could not always be distinguished from deceptive ones. This lack of distinguishing features is now also impacting journals claiming to be indexed in PubMed and claiming to be members of the ICMJE (Teixeira da Silva, 2020b). Dony et al. (2020) recommended a sound, common, and reliable framework for identifying and combating fake journals and publishers that manages to overcome any bias or discrimination.

In this section, we introduced readers to a description of blacklists created and maintained by Beall, and that despite their flaws, they remain popular, even four years after Beall shut down his blog (Beall, 2017). This is further evidenced by continued heavy citation to Beall's most seminal paper, Beall (2016) (Kendall, 2021).

Section snippets

Divisiveness and discrimination in academic publishing within the context of “predatory” publishing

Discrimination and racism are not recent topics in academia, particularly in academic journal publishing (Coleman, 2005). Earlier research in this area largely highlighted cases where established prestigious white-run journals would rarely publish the works of black scholars, especially if such works challenged predominantly white views (Anderson, 1988). Condescending attitudes by white scholars who deemed professional journals owned by people of colour as being polemical or lacking in

Divisive and potentially discriminatory elements in Beall's blacklists and blog

Beall's anti-OA bias was revealed by Beall himself (Beall, 2013) and by Beall's supervisor (Swauger, 2017), a position that is antithetic to OA librarianship. As was emphasized above, Beall's blog and blacklists were an existential threat to many OA journals or publishers, some of which (the unlucky false positives) may have actually been valid scholarly publishing entities. The perhaps unintentional but consequential result of Beall's actions, attitudes, blog and blacklists – as well as

Risks of downstream proliferation of Beall-induced discriminatory ideology

One of the risks of race-engendered ideology in some of Beall's blog posts and teachings is the potential for cloning those ideas or their further abuse by other academics. For example, Altbach (2018) rebranded Beall's blacklists of potentially predatory OA journals and publishers, referring to them as “fake”, thereby creating an entirely new and radical misleading reclassification of those publishing entities while also employing arguments based on national or cultural profiling to support

Anonymous blacklists are furthering discriminatory ideologies

False, erroneous and misleading ideologies based on Beall's now-discredited and defunct blog and blacklists are being promoted and maintained as resurrected and loosely updated anonymously run OA blacklists, with the same flaws as Beall's original blacklists, including the use of Beall's outdated, flawed and incomplete 2015 version 3 criteria,21

Suggested directions for improving “predatory publishing” journalology

The rationale for creating a blacklist or a whitelist, for example of invalid/unscholarly or valid/scholarly journals/publishers, respectively, and to assign a label of “predatory” to any such listed entity is a freedom. Yet, like for all freedoms, freedom of speech and expression must carry with it the burden of accountability and responsibility, a burden that Beall himself appeared to have lamented as a result of not carefully considering the weaknesses and warning signs that his blog and

Conclusion

Race-based research, and publishing-related issues that have elements of discrimination, are under intense scrutiny. Polemic topics that make an association between a morally debatable character, such as IQ or race, can induce heated debate and even anger, if the methodology and objectives are not clearly understood, or if erroneous conclusions are drawn based on erroneous methodology (Cofnas, 2020). It is likely that papers that somehow involve racially or culturally distinct themes will

Funding

None.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

The authors, who are co-corresponding authors, contributed equally to all aspects of the ideas, writing, development and editing of the paper, all drafts and take responsibility for its content.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest although the first author has had public ideological differences with Beall. The authors have used the terms “blacklists” and “whitelists”, as widely employed and accepted terms in this field of study in library and information science, merely to differentiate lists of journals or publishers that have, sensu lato, unscholarly versus scholarly properties. The authors have published papers or opinions on aspects related to, and critical of, Beall's

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the discussion on this issue provided by Aceil Al-Khatib (Faculty of Dentistry, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid, Jordan) and Prof. Never Assan (Department of Agriculture Management, Faculty of Science and Technology, Zimbabwe Open University, Zimbabwe).

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