Jeffrey Beall

Medical Publishing Triage – Chronicling Predatory Open Access Publishers

This editorial examines the problem of predatory publishers and how they have negatively affected scholarly communication. Society relies on high-quality, peer-reviewed articles for public policy, legal cases, and improving the public health. Researchers need to be aware of how predatory publishers operate and need to avoid falling into their traps. The editorial examines the recent history of predatory publishers and how they have become prominent in the world of scholarly journals.

What I learned from predatory publishers

This article is a first-hand account of the author’s work identifying and listing predatory publishers from 2012 to 2017. Predatory publishers use the gold (author pays) open access model and aim to generate as much revenue as possible, often foregoing a proper peer review. The paper details how predatory publishers came to exist and shows how they were largely enabled and condoned by the open-access social movement, the scholarly publishing industry, and academic librarians. The author describes tactics predatory publishers used to attempt to be removed from his lists, details the damage predatory journals cause to science, and comments on the future of scholarly publishing.

Spurious alternative impact factors: The scale of the problem from an academic perspective.

The recent explosion in the number of predatory journals has led to the appearance of questionable websites providing fake or spurious impact factors, which are analyzed and discussed here. We believe that academic associations, universities, and research funding bodies must take action to stop these questionable practices.

Predatory publishing is just one of the consequences of gold open access

This article examines the ways the gold open-access model is negatively affecting scholarly communication.

Dangerous Predatory Publishers Threaten Medical Research

This article introduces predatory publishers in the context of biomedical sciences research. It describes the characteristics of predatory publishers, including spamming and using fake metrics, and it describes the problems they cause for science and universities. Predatory journals often fail to properly manage peer review, allowing pseudo-science to be published dressed up as authentic science. Academic evaluation is also affected, as some researchers take advantage of the quick, easy, and cheap publishing predatory journals provide. By understanding how predatory publishers operate, researchers can avoid becoming victimized by them.

Free Books: Loading Brief MARC Records for Open-Access Books in an Academic Library Catalog

Mbooks are open-access, digitized books freely available on the Internet. This article describes the Auraria Librarys experience of loading brief MARC records for Mbooks into its online public access catalog and looks at some of the issues that arose from the record-loading project. Despite the low quality of the records, librarians in Auraria Library thought that loading them into the catalog was advantageous because of the rich content in the collection and because many of the records could be improved using the global update functionality in the catalog. Making the records available through the catalog, as opposed to merely linking to the entire collection from the Librarys Web page, was considered to be valuable because of the aggregation a catalog provides and because the Mbooks collection helped fill gaps in the Librarys physical collections. As more open-access, digitized books become available, libraries will need to plan and manage how best to provide access to them.

Predatory journals and the breakdown of research cultures

Like human cultures, research cultures are passed down from one generation of scholars to the next. The advent of predatory journals and conferences is damaging existing research cultures. Predatory publishers and conferences carry out a fake or incomplete peer review that allows low-quality, un-vetted research to become a part of the scholarly record. This article examines predatory publishers and conferences within the framework of the five functions of scholarly communication. Academic institutions need to revise their evaluation policies based on the new realities predatory journals and conferences have created.

Predatory Journals Threaten the Quality of Published Medical Research

Ever since scholarly open-access publishing started to gain a foothold over a decade ago, many hundreds of open-access journals and publishers have emerged around the world, including many journals that are dependent exclusively on payments from authors to meet their expenses. The purpose of this Viewpoint is to describe the negative aspects of predatory publishing and how the behaviors of such publishers erode the principles of the peer-review system. J Orthop Sports Phys Ther 2017;47(1):3-5. doi:10.2519/jospt.2017.0601.

Dublin Core: An Obituary

The Dublin Core Metadata Standard was conceived illegitimately, had a troubled life, and has finally met its demise. Developed as a tool for online resource discovery, the standard waned after the arrival of Google. Because its fields were designed with a lack of specificity, Dublin Core suffered from nonstandard data elements and poor interoperability. Also, the poor organization behind the initiative contributed to its failure. Dublin Core will likely soon be replaced by an emerging standard, the Metadata Object Description Schema.

The impact of vendor records on cataloging and access in academic libraries

The addition of low-quality vendor records to the bibliographic utilities (OCLC and RLIN) has had a significant impact on cataloging and access in academic libraries. Vendor records are brief, non-standard bibliographic records created by booksellers and loaded into the utilities. Because many libraries are choosing to copy these records from the utilities to their local online catalogs without editing or enhancing them, much effort is being duplicated, as individual libraries make the same enhancements locally. Less original cataloging is being conducted in the languages represented by the vendor records, and more upgrading of lower-quality records is now necessary, a change that has affected cataloging workflows, and ultimately access, in academic libraries. Quantitative research is needed on the impact of vendor records.