Following up on a series of five entries on the Thammasat University Libraries blog about how to avoid predatory websites, on Wednesday, December 14, a group from the Thammasat University Libraries visited King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT), headed by Assistant Professor Akekarin Yolrabil, the Director, Ms. Thitima Hiranvejchayangkool, Associate Director of Administration and Development, and Mr. Krit Pattamaroj, Associate Director of Information Services and Information Literacy. The occasion was a lecture by Dr. Jeffrey Beall, an American librarian. Dr. Beall is the scholarly initiatives librarian at Auraria Library, and an associate professor at the University of Colorado, Denver. Dr. Beall, in his first visit to the Kingdom, spoke about the dangers for researchers presenting their work to the open access (OA) publishing movement, where there are many individuals taking advantage of the current lack of standards and protection for writers. Dr. Beall’s blog, Scholarly Open Access, maintains an influential list of what he terms predatory open access publishing. Since writers pay fees to be published in many OA periodicals, there is always the risk that some people may create false and misleading ways to get money from researchers. Their work is posted on a worthless website and the predators obtain the copyright for the research. This happens when researchers do not take the time to carefully check the periodicals they are thinking of sending their work to. Dr. Beall recommended that all scholars look first to periodicals that are available in local university libraries, where they may be consulted. In such cases, the researcher may be assured that the journal is reputable and that it exists in printed form, instead of just being a potentially misleading website. Predatory publishers claim false journal impact factors as a way of making potential customers believe they are serious and reliable. Dr. Beall remarked that at best, real impact factors are a sign of how many times articles are cited in the scholarly literature:
They don’t mean the journal is good.
With false, invented impact factors, predatory publishers misleadingly use a statistic whose value is still being debated. The audience at KMUTT was most interested in Dr. Beall’s presentation and asked a number of serious questions about his work. One query was about how many people work on his team to maintain the blog, Scholarly Open Access. Dr. Beall replied: One.
He does the work single-handedly, even adding updates about doubtful spam emails he received soliciting scholarly contributions while traveling in the Kingdom. Dr. Beall added that he is one of the few who appreciates when people forward him such spam emails, since this helps him tabulate new scams. Two recent updates show that distinguished names in scholarship are being used by predatory publishers to win the trust of their victims:
Questionable Spam Email from a Springer Nature Journal
Fake “Institute” Has Fooled Many — Even Harvard
These two updates show the importance for students and ajarns to not just assume websites are serious, but do extra research to verify that they are what they claim to be. Among pertinent questions at the end of the presentation at KMUTT, Mr. Krit Pattamaroj asked Dr. Beall who would take over his work when he retired. Dr. Beall admitted he had no one in mind and was accepting suggestions. Other queries addressed how to find out if conferences are also predatory, organized by associations that do not really exist and do not add to the academic prestige of those who attend and make presentations. Dr. Beall explained that such conferences are difficult to track, since they pop up quickly and vanish again, collecting money for events in touristic locations such as Las Vegas or even Bangkok, and then disappear again. He suggested that before spending institutional money to attend conferences, all ajarns should make careful inquiries about the seriousness of such gatherings, to make sure funding is well used. He also noted that predatory journals typically list the names of ajarns to make publications seem more credible, even though the ajarns are unaware that their names are being used this way. Replying to a question of what to do if this happens, Dr. Beall recommended writing an email to the predatory publisher, followed by a letter from a university lawyer, and if necessary, a group effort from as many of the real ajarns as possible whose names misleadingly appear on any predatory publication they have not in fact endorsed.
Dr. Beall did offer some hope for the future, when asked if any legal measures could be taken against predatory websites and their publishers. He noted that if such websites found that their business was hurt by appearing on his list, they merely vanished and reappeared under a different name on a new site. Yet at the moment, a legal case is going through the American court system that may eventually improve matters on an international level. In an August article, Inside Higher Education described how The Federal Trade Commission, an independent agency of the United States government,
filed a complaint against the academic journal publisher OMICS Group and two of its subsidiaries, saying the publisher deceives scholars and misrepresents the editorial rigor of its journals. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada, marks the first time the FTC has gone after what are often known as “predatory” publishers. Such publishers exploit open-access publishing as a way to charge steep fees to researchers who believe their work will be printed in legitimate journals, when in fact the journals may publish anyone who pays and lack even a basic peer-review process. Ioana Rusu, a staff attorney with the FTC, said in an interview that the commission is responding to a growing number of calls from people in academe for some sort of action to be taken against publishers that take advantage of scholars wishing to publish in open-access journals. “There was definitely a sense that nobody had done anything about it,” Rusu said. “Now we’re watching.” OMICS’ business practices have been scrutinized for years. The company, based in Hyderabad, India, publishers more than 700 open-access journals, and has created a number of imprints — including iMedPub, also named in the complaint — to expand its presence in the scholarly publishing market. Several of OMICS’ journals have names similar to other, legitimate journals, which critics say is an attempt to confuse scholars. “If anything is predatory, it’s that publisher,” said Jeffrey Beall, scholarly communications librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver. “It’s the worst of the worst.”
With some legal precedent for prosecuting predatory publishers, these activities may become less profitable for those who exploit researchers. For now, it is essential to be vigilant and devote a little extra time to being sure where to send research for publication. Naturally, traditional publishers who do not demand money in exchange for publishing are one ideal route for avoiding these problems. Or, as Dr. Beall advises, always check his list before thinking about sending any research to an open access publisher, to avoid later disappointment.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)