Beall's List Research Articles

Penetration of Nigerian predatory biomedical open access journals 2007–2012: a bibliometric study

ABSTRACTThis paper presents the bibliometric characteristics of 32 biomedical open access journals published by Academic Journals and International Research Journals – the two Nigerian publishers in Jeffery Beall's list of 23 predatory open access publishers in 2012. Data about the journals and the authors of their articles were collected from the websites of the publishers, Google Scholar and Web of Science. As at December 2012, the journals had together produced a total of 5,601 papers written by 5,599 authors, and received 12,596 citations. Authors from Asia accounted for 56.79% of the publications; those from Africa wrote 28.35% while Europe contributed 7.78%. Authors from Africa accounted for 18.25% of the citations these journals received, and this is about one‐third the number of citations by authors in Asia (54.62%). At country level, India ranks first in the top 10 citer countries, while Nigeria, the host country of the journals, ranked eighth. More in‐depth studies are required to develop further information about the journals such as how much scientific information the journals contain, as well as the science literacy of the authors and the editorial.

Publishing Ethics and Predatory Practices: A Dilemma for All Stakeholders of Science Communication.

Publishing scholarly articles in traditional and newly-launched journals is a responsible task, requiring diligence from authors, reviewers, editors, and publishers. The current generation of scientific authors has ample opportunities for publicizing their research. However, they have to selectively target journals and publish in compliance with the established norms of publishing ethics. Over the past few years, numerous illegitimate or predatory journals have emerged in most fields of science. By exploiting gold Open Access publishing, these journals paved the way for low-quality articles that threatened to change the landscape of evidence-based science. Authors, reviewers, editors, established publishers, and learned associations should be informed about predatory publishing practices and contribute to the trustworthiness of scholarly publications. In line with this, there have been several attempts to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate journals by blacklisting unethical journals (the Jeffrey Beall's list), issuing a statement on transparency and best publishing practices (the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association's and other global organizations' draft document), and tightening the indexing criteria by the Directory of Open Access Journals. None of these measures alone turned to be sufficient. All stakeholders of science communication should be aware of multiple facets of unethical practices and publish well-checked and evidence-based articles.

Open access and the Australian Occupational Therapy Journal

There has been an increasing call for peer-reviewed journals that publish scholarly evidence to become ‘Open Access’ whereby their contents can be freely retrieved with cost incurred to individuals accessing them. Two subtypes of Open Access journals are ‘hybrid open access’ (some articles are open access and others not), and ‘delayed open access’ (some articles are open access and other articles have delayed access) (Ohno-Machado, 2011). Traditionally, journals have been published in two ways. In the first instance, professional associations, government organisations, universities or learned societies published journals that were only available to members as a benefit or subscribers to that journal. The second option included journals that were published by private companies (e.g. Sage and Wiley-Blackwell) and subscriptions were sold to those who wanted access to the journals. In both these contexts, access to journal articles was restricted to individuals who had a paid subscription or access fee. There are several reasons why journals' becoming Open Access has become a timely topic. An emphasis on evidence-based practice; knowledge translation; journal quality metrics (such as impact factor); increased international visibility; higher citation rates for authors; plus many agencies who fund research requiring grant recipients to publish their findings in journals that are classified as Open Access (Willinsky, 2006) all put pressure on journals to provide this. Journals can be ‘Open Access’ in several ways. Firstly, a journal can be completely ‘Open Access’ using a fee-based approach or a no-fee option. The costs associated with fee-based open access journals is borne either by the journal's sponsoring organisation, the journal's publisher, the authors who submit the articles to the journal, the author's employer, a research grant an author has received, or a combination thereof. The Australian Physiotherapy Association's Journal of Physiotherapy is a recent example of a journal that is now no-fee, open access. Alternatively, a journal can have specific articles that are classified as accessible even though there may be other articles that are not. Editors can decide to make an article freely available or authors pay a fee to the journal publisher to enable free access. This is the current arrangement for the Australian Occupational Therapy Journal (AOTJ) with Wiley-Blackwell. One result of passing on the cost of making an article ‘Open Access’ is the rise of ‘vanity publishers’ and ‘predatory publishers’ who produce material that is presented as ‘open access’, but then charge authors large fees to accept and publish their manuscripts as a means of generating profits. ‘Many of these publishers are corrupt and exist only to make money off the author processing charges that are billed to authors upon acceptance of their scientific manuscripts’ (Beall, 2013, n.p.). These sources of information are considered not credible and are best avoided. A list of these journals and their publishers is available from Beall's List of Predatory Publishers 2013 (http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/12/06/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2013/). AOTJ currently complies with all relevant research funding requirements by offering a variety of Open Access options. The AOTJ utilises a ‘hybrid open access’ approach where an author who has an article accepted for publication is able to pay a fee directly to the publishers to make it Open Access. The first issue of the current year and special issues of the AOTJ are also freely accessible for a period of time when they are first published. If the AOTJ wanted to become completely Open Access, then the cost linked to this would need to be carried either by the individual authors publishing in the AOTJ or by Occupational Therapy Australia Limited (OT AUSTRALIA) who contracts Wiley-Blackwell to publish the AOTJ and provides AOTJ as a member benefit. Both options would have additional cost implications for the parties involved. One primary advantage of making the AOTJ Open Access would be that it would likely increase the journal's Impact Factor by making its articles easier to retrieve and cite (Björk & Solomon, 2012). The question to be considered and debated is the cost-benefit of such a move for the Australian occupational therapy community, OT AUSTRALIA as an organisation, and OT AUSTRALIA's membership, Wiley-Blackwell as the publisher of the AOTJ and the users and consumers of occupational therapy evidence.

Predatory and fake scientific journals/publishers: A global outbreak with rising trend: A review

In recent times some publishers are intensively exploiting the model of open access publishing. During the last several years, studies have shown that there was a substantial increase in the number of fake publishers and hijacked journals. These cyber criminals make money by stealing the identities of legitimate journals and collecting the article processing charges on the papers that are submitted. This is all accomplished by a well developed framework that includes web development steps, intensive e-mail marketing and victim selections. This review article strives to recommend that the Beall's list of predatory publishers and journals should be consulted every time when an author plans to submit scientific work to some of the journals that are indexed by Thomson Reuters/Institute for Scientific Information-ISI and covered by the Journal Citation Report. Also, the authors are advised to be 'up to date' with new information regarding this controversial topic by informing themselves through various web-sites and specialized scientific portals. The review paper itself strives to summarize the most recent investigations on predatory and spurious journals/publishers which affect the entire scientific community, thus representing an outbreak with rising trend not only on national and regional level, but on global level as well.