Explores types of unethical publishing tactics among false publishers claiming to be Open Access Scholarly Publishers. Presented at "Discovery to Delivery 5: Better Together", in Indianapolis, on April 25, 2014.

1. Unearthing Open Access
Resource Evaluation:
Joining Together to Avoid Inadequate Peer Review
Process and Predatory Publishing
Nina Collins
McMillen Library, Indiana Tech
Discovery to Delivery 5: Better Together
April 25, 2014

2. Project Beginnings
 Liaison to PhD program, Global Leadership
 Our students need instruction on evaluating journals
 Acceptance rate
 Impact factor and other bibliometrics
 Editorial board and Institutional affiliation
 Quality of papers submitted
 Scope of Journal
 Spam email solicitations for manuscripts
 “Call for paper”
 Root issue: Need to evaluate new Open Access publications

3. Traditional Scholarly Publishing
 Traditional Model
 Scholar produces a scientific manuscript, then sends it to the editor of a scholarly
journal
 Editor reviews the manuscript, then sends it to peer reviewers
 Peer reviewers review the manuscript and return the manuscript to the editor
with comments, suggestions, and recommendations
 The editor makes a final decision concerning acceptance, acceptance with
modification, or rejection
 Author gives all copyright permissions to the publisher, who assumes all costs in
publication

4. Traditional Scholarly Publishing
 Editors of journals play a gatekeeping role
 Journals require subscriptions for access
 Having signed away copyright, creators of the scholarly works must pay for
access
 Who pays for access:
 Libraries
 Institution pays salary of researchers
 Grant funded research?

5. Open Access Scholarly Publishing
“By Open Access, we mean the free, immediate, availability on the
public Internet of those works which scholars give to the world
without expectation of payment – permitting any user to read,
download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these
articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or
use them for any other lawful purpose.”
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC),(2013)

6. Green Open Access
 Creators are allowed to place a preprint copy of the manuscript on an
institutional repository
 Resources on the institutional repository are freely available to all
 Costs of maintaining the repository are funded by the institution
 Only works when the institution has a repository, and encourages faculty to
archive their scholarly content on the repository
 Most traditional publishers support Green OA
 As the Interlibrary Loan librarian, I LOVE Green OA. I often check to see if a
resource is available in a repository before requesting ILL

7. Gold OA
 Often called the “Author pays” model, used by online journals
 The costs of publication are usually funded by the authors, in the form of
“author fees”, or “article processing fees”
 Author fees vary significantly based on the discipline and the publisher
 Many OA publishers have policies for waiving the author fees for scholars in
developing nations, or who cannot afford the fee
 The fee is sometimes paid by the research sponsor (Institution or funding
agency)

8. Benefits of OA
 No barrier to access
 Taxpayers can access the research they helped fund
 Permission to reuse, if giving credit to original creator
 Increases visibility and usage of scholarly works
 Increases access to scientific work for developing nations
 Increases citations of scholarly works (Gargouri, 2010)
Suber (2012)

9. Criticisms of OA
 How much value is added by publishers (editors, copy-editors, and
illustrators)?
 What are the real costs involved in Open Access publishing?
 Green, Gold, Delayed, Hybrid
 Business Models
 Quality
 Discoverability of materials in Institutional Repositories Salo (2007)
 Predatory Publishers
Crawford (2011)

10. Predatory Publishers
 Use the author-pays model, Gold Open Access
 Are not limited to Open Access publications. Can include conferences, or
traditional publishing business models
 Remind us that as scholars, evaluation of resources cannot be
underestimated; we must be diligent
 Engage in Inadequate peer-review processes.
 Look like legitimate publishers
Beall (2013)

11. Predatory Publishing
Unethical Practices
 Deception
 Negligence or non-adherence to standards
 Lack of transparency
Beall (2013)

12. Unethical Practices: Deception
 The websites look like legitimate publishers (ex.)
 The journal/publisher name mimics an established journal/publisher (ex.)
 Journal name does not reflect geographic location (ex.)
 Not indexed by reputable indexing and abstracting services, but claim to be
 Coverage is misrepresented in abstracting & indexing services
 List databases as abstracting/indexing services that are not true
abstracting/indexing services (ex.)
 Make up citation metrics
 List people on the editorial board who have not agreed to serve OR refuse to
provide names of editorial board
 Lie about location of publisher headquarters (ex. Avens Publishing Group)
Beall (2013)

13. Unethical Practices: Negligence or
Non-adherence to Standards
 Inadequate peer-review
 A publisher may list the same
editor for all its journals
 A journal has very broad
coverage or subject matter
 Author side fee
 Spelling or Grammar errors (ex.)
 Fail to provide contact
information for the journal or
editors
 Use email to solicit
manuscripts (spam)
 Fleet Startup (ex.)
 May not use ISSN or DOIs
 Licensing problems (ex.)
 Use Yahoo! Or Gmail
addresses
 Poor website search
functionality (ex.)
 Dead Links (ex.)
Beall (2013)

14. Unethical Practices: Lack of transparency
 Claim Peer review, when they do not practice adequate peer review
 Little or no information about the peer review process
 Fail to clearly state author side fees
 Fail to list editorial board or contact information for editorial board
 The only contact information for the editor is an online form, or an email
through the website
Beall (2013)

15. Predatory Publishing Quick Check
 Has the publisher started dozens of new Open Access titles all at once?
 Do the published titles have very few papers (if any)?
 Does the publisher send e-mails to myriad researchers asking for manuscript
submissions or to serve on editorial boards?
 Does the publisher fail to disclose the names of editorial board members or
editors?
 Is the publisher’s address NOT verifiable?
 Is there very little evidence of peer review?
Crawford (2011)

16. Peer Review Sting
 Predatory Publishers often exercise poor peer-review practices.
 Turn around time is very fast (a week or two).
 In a recent sting operation, a fake scientific paper, written by a fake
scientist, working at a fake university, was submitted to 304 Open Access
journals.
 It was accepted by 54% of the Open Access publications.
 Many of the publishers that accepted the paper were listed on Beall’s List
of Predatory Publishers.
Bohannon, J. (2013)

17. Peer Review Fail
 In 2005, graduate students in the PDOS research group at MIT CSAIL
built an automatic scientific paper generator, called SCIgen, Stribling
et al (2005).
 Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble built an automatic SCIgen
detector, to unmask SCIgen generated papers, Labbe (2013).
 Recently, more than 120 SCIgen created scientific papers are being
withdrawn from publishers, including Springer and IEEE, Norden
(2014).

18. Journal Evaluation in Perspective
 Peer-review is an integral part of scientific practice. As scholars, we must be
diligent in our critiques of scientific research.
 Continued evaluation on the part of scholars marks the distinction between
science and pseudo-science.
 Individuals have lost their jobs for publishing in predatory journals, or for
serving on editorial boards of predatory journals. Beall, J. (2014).
 One’s professional reputation can make or break their career.

19. Implications for Librarians
 Collection Development
 Discovery Layer (I used the PPET Project to assess new Open Access journals before
adding them in the knowledge base in WMS)
 Interlibrary Loan
 Liaison Roles

20. PPET Project
Predatory Publishing Evaluation Tool
 Created a checklist tool for emerging scholars to help them
evaluate online journals
 PPET Project
 Partial online checklist tool
 Our Ph.D. Students are distance students
 We could tack on an optional user survey

21. References
Beall, J. (2014, February 20). Iceland professor in hot water for publishing in predatory journals. Scholarly Open
Access: Critical analysis of scholarly open access publications. Retrieved from
http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/02/20/iceland-professor-in-hot-water-for-publishing-in-predatory-journals/
Beall, J. (2014, January 24). University of Pristina Rector under fire for publishing in predatory journals. Scholarly
Open Access: Critical analysis of scholarly open access publications. Retrieved from
http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/01/24/university-of-pristina-rector-under-fire-for-publishing-in-predatory-journals/
Beall, J. (2013). Unethical Practices in Scholarly, Open-Access Publishing. Journal of Information Ethics, 22(1), 11-
20. doi: 10.3172/JIE.22.1.11
Bohannon, J. (2013, October 4). Who’s afraid of peer review? Science, 342(6). Retrieved from
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
Crawford, W. (2011). ALA Editions Special Reports : Open Access : What You Need to Know Now. Chicago, IL,
USA: American Library Association Editions
Gargouri, Y., et al. (2010). Self-selected or mandated, Open Access increases citation impact for higher quality
research. PLoS One, 5(10).
Labbé, C. (2013). SCIgen Detection. Retrieved April 23, 2014, from http://scigendetection.imag.fr/main.php
Noorden, R. V. (2014, February 24). Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. Nature News. Retrieved
April 23, 2014, from http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763
Salo, D. (2008). “Innkeeper at the roach motel.” Library Trends: 57(2).
SPARC, (2013). Why Open Access? Retrieved from http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/open-access/why-oa
Straub, D., & Anderson, C. (2010). Journal Quality and citations: common metrics and considerations about their
use. MIS Quarterly, 34(1), iii-xii.
Stribling, J., Krohn, J., & Aguayo, D. (2005). SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator. Retrieved April 23, 2014,
from http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
Suber, P. (2012). MIT Press Essential Knowledge : Open Access. Cambridge, MA, USA MIT Press

22. For More Information:
 Beall’s 2014 List of Predatory Publishers
 PPET Project
 Contact me
Nina Collins
260.422.5561 x 2155
nkcollins@indianatech.edu
Twitter: @CollinsnNina
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/collinsnina
www.collinsn.com
Postscript: Thanks to all who provided great feedback today! Due to good feedback, the PPET Project will
Continue to evolve, beginning with the changing of the name to simply, the PET Project. Thanks again!