From: Kevin Smith <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 15:04:03 +0000

This blog post made me curious.  Surely gaming the impact factor is a
practice we should be made aware of in the academic library world,
since impact is a selling point for subscriptions.  So are there
subscription journals on this list, or are such "predatory practices"
really confined to open access publishing?

The Nature blog post initially led me to think that, regardless of
business model, these were very obscure journals.  They cite two
specific titles, and it is probably fair to call the Iranian Journal
of Fuzzy Systems obscure, at least to Western academics.  It is
apparently published by an Iranian university.  But the other one
named, the International Journal of Crashworthiness, is published by
Taylor and Francis, so is likely part of a journal package sold to
many universities.  Knowing that made me more curious.

I selected a random sample of fifteen of these titles to see who
published them.  While it would be unfair to blame the publishers for
all of the practices that caused Thomson Reuters to ban these titles,
knowing their sources can at least give us a better idea of the scope
of the problem of dubious publishing practices.  So from my random
sample of fifteen titles, here is a breakdown of who the publishers of
these banned titles are:

* Only one of the fifteen is a purely open access journal, published
by an association and not on Beall's list of predatory OA
publications.  The remainder appear to be subscription journals, most
with a "hybrid" paid OA option.

* One other, in addition to the OA title mentioned above, is published
by an association.

* Four are published by small presses of which I have not heard before
(a subjective classification, I know).

* The remaining nine titles from my sample are published by four of
the large commercial academic publishers: Taylor and Francis (2), Sage
(3), Elsevier (2), and Springer (2).

This breakdown confirms my impression that we need to have a broader
discussion about publishing ethics and good stewardship of academic
resources rather than focusing our attention only on misbehaving open
access publishers.

Kevin L. Smith, M.L.S., J.D.
Director, Copyright and Scholarly Communication
Duke University Libraries
P.O. Box 90193
Durham, NC  27708
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-----Original Message-----
From: Pamela Puryear <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 10:35:14 -0400

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/06/new-record-66-journals-banned-for-boosting-impact-factor-with-self-citations.html

Pamela E. Puryear, MA, MLS, CCRM
NCARS Resource Manager
North Carolina Agricultural Research Service (NCARS)