An integrated paradigm shift to deal with ‘predatory publishing’

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102481Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Unscholarly ‘predatory’ publishing affects all academics and librarians.

  • There are problems with the 55 criteria used to establish Beall's blacklists.

  • A fundamental paradigm shift is needed to reform ‘predatory’ publishing research.

  • From the 55 criteria, we suggest maintaining 9, eliminating 24, and correcting 22.

  • Rewards-based academic publishing, independent of blacklists, needs reform.

Abstract

The issue of ‘predatory publishing’, and indeed unscholarly publishing practices, affects all academics and librarians around the globe. However, there are some flaws in arguments and analyses made in several papers published on this topic, in particular those that have relied heavily on the blacklists that were established by Jeffrey Beall. While Beall advanced the discussion on ‘predatory publishing’, relying entirely on his blacklists to assess a journal for publishing a paper is problematic. This is because several of the criteria underlying those blacklists were insufficiently specific, excessively broad, arbitrary with no scientific validation, or incorrect identifiers of predatory behavior. The validity of those criteria has been deconstructed in more detail in this paper. From a total of 55 criteria in Beall's last/latest 2015 set of criteria, we suggest maintaining nine, eliminating 24, and correcting the remaining 22. While recognizing that this exercise involves a measure of subjectivity, it needs to advance in order to arrive – in a future exercise – at a more sensitive set of criteria. Fortified criteria alone, or the use of blacklists and whitelists, cannot combat ‘predatory publishing’, and an overhaul of rewards-based academic publishing is needed, supported by a set of reliable criteria-based guidance system.

Section snippets

Researchers continue to use Jeffrey Beall’s blacklist and predatory criteria despite their many deficiencies

This article discusses how, even about a decade after Jeffrey Beall coined the term ‘predatory publishing’, his blacklists and ‘predatory criteria’ continue to remain at the heart of scholarly publishing and librarianship. We take our discussion further by indicating that those blacklists, and the criteria that were used to establish them, have – to some extent – misled academics, policy-makers, editors and even publishers regarding how, and why, an open access (OA) journal or publisher may be

Sole reliance on Beall’s blacklists for assessing ‘predatory publishing’ may be inaccurate

Retrospectively, quantitative analyses that were based on Beall's blacklists prior to January of 2017 were thus potentially flawed, as are any studies that were conducted between 2017 and 2021. In this section, we focus on studies that used Beall's blacklists, relying entirely or partially on those blacklists to draw behavioral conclusions about individual academics or groups of academics, universities, countries, cultural groups, etc., to somehow claim that they may somehow be “inferior”

How to move beyond the Beall ideology and blacklists?

It is incredulous that almost five years after the closure of Beall's blog and blacklists, academics continue to rely on those sources of potential misinformation. In this section, we look at possible alternatives, their strengths and weaknesses, in order to look beyond the Beall-based influence in academic publishing.

A paradigm shift in thinking is required

Chirico (2017) stated (p. 186) that “not all articles published in legitimate journals are good, because sometimes legitimate peer review fails to identify weak or fraudulent papers”. Marco-Cuenca et al. (2021) showed that more than 75% of fraudulent articles in the European Union were published in journals included in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and had an IF, suggesting that the issue of “predatory” publishing is not only restricted to OA journals, much less to journals or publishers on

Other possible complimentary solutions to avoid ‘predatory publishing’

Even if academics rely on blacklists and whitelists for guidance, this alone is not enough for them to survive the increasingly cut-throat world of academic publishing. Authors' must assume personal responsibility to ensure that they avoid truly “predatory” publishing venues because they may lead to unethical publishing and unsafe clinical practices that may adversely affect their careers (Rupp et al., 2019). For this reason, criteria need to be debated and refined, as we have done in Table 1.

Conclusion and limitations

Although ‘predatory publishing’ is currently a big problem in academia, blacklisting or whitelisting are not, in themselves, viable solutions. Such lists have been and continue to be used, but they have failed to some extent, such as Beall's blacklists, which has been the main focus of this paper. Banning “predatory” journals (Beall, 2016), even more so when relying on Beall's blacklists and their flawed criteria (Table 1), does not resolve the problem because current lists of “predatory”

Funding

None.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

The first author conceived the first round of ideas, and wrote the first draft. All authors fortified and contributed to all subsequent drafts and take collective responsibility for the content. All authors are co-corresponding authors.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare no relevant conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Dr. Daniel Graziotin (Institute of Software Technology, University of Stuttgart, Germany) for sharing his ideas and interpretations of the topic of “predatory publishing” on an earlier version of the paper, and for providing some useful suggestions. The authors also thank the input and critical feedback provided by Prof. Panagiotis Tsigaris (Department of Economics, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC, Canada) on a more recent version of the paper.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this paper reflect those exclusively of the authors, and should not be construed as the opinion of the organizations they work for.

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