Some concluding remarks.
Saying that publishing in so-called predatory journals is a waste of time and of your
precious research data and work appears to be...
Not true. In a substantial number of occasions a paper published in such a journal (or predatory
publisher behind it) results in citations (see results of citation counts (round 50% of the papers
had at least one citation) and the examples of the most cited papers found in the re-evaluation
results of a number of journals). The analysis of citations counts of randomly chosen journals
and publishers gave an average between 1-5 citations per paper, looking at the most cited papers
of journals I checked in my little re-evaluation gives some impressive number of citations for
their most cited papers. So to say the least: “It is not always a waste and the scientific
community is judging a paper on its merits by reading it and use it if it is found to be of any use
and fulfils some academic purpose”.
Beall’s list is always right and should be treated as ‘a holy bible’ when it comes to
predatory or not.
Well it is clear that Beall’s list contains fake journals and publishers that act, to say the least,
misleading. However numerous (stand-alone) journals look to me genuine and might be not
always high in quality standards in terms of all sorts of journal/publishing regulations (keep in
mind that every ‘service’ DOI, CrossRef, DOAJ, etc. all cost money which might be an issue
for a starting journal and/or publishing house). The absence of ‘accepted’ indices is not equal
to predatory, it is not always easy to obtain an index [8].
Individual researchers should be blacklisted for having published in an alleged predatory
journal.
The consequences of blacklisting and better ways than blacklisting individual researchers has
been described already a long time before predatory publishing [9]. The lack of value of a
blacklist when it comes to predatory or not is discussed thoroughly elsewhere [10]. The only
thing I can add to this is that I tend to believe in the honesty of researchers and their genuine
wish to publish their work for others to use (and of course make visible what they have done or
are doing in terms of scientific work). I also believe that the scientific community should ‘judge’
and/or value the work by reading, using and ultimately citing it or not. Simply disqualify a
researcher solely based on the fact that the journal where his or her paper is published is
predatory according to Beall’s list is unjust and way too simplistic. Judging the work on its own
merits I would say.
Beall’s list should be susceptible to revisions after re-evaluation.
It seems that the objective of the Beall’s list is to make the list larger, however there should be
a (real) chance to remove items. The way Jeffrey Beall was the “judge jury and executioner” in
his ‘verdict’ on whether a journal or publisher is (potentially) predatory has been questioned on
several occasions, see for example [11]. My attempt has nothing to do with ‘downplaying’ or
‘denying’ the existence of predatory, fake or pseudo-scientific journals and/or publishers.
Thanks to the initiative of Jeffrey Beall we all are aware of this down-site of open access
publishing which business model implies the more manuscripts are accepted the more revenues.
As Phil Davis stated about the well-known Bohannon reports (where a bogus scientific paper
was send to journals in order to see whether their peer-review (if taken place) would identify
this): “Beall was good at spotting publishers with poor quality control (82% of publishers on
his list accepted the manuscript). That means that Beall is falsely accusing nearly one in five as
being a “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publisher” on
appearances alone” [12]. In Table 1. I tried to summarize the results of the re-evaluation of
some journals and publishers and this might correspond quite well with the fact that at least
20% of the journals on Beall’s list might be falsely accused of being predatory.