From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 21:59:52 -0400

I was under the impression that Elsevier did not publish the journal
that accepted the "sting" article, but that Elsevier has a services
arrangement with the journal's publisher.  Am I mistaken about this?
It's a material item.  In a service relationship, Elsevier ( or any of
the publishers that do this kind of thing, including Wiley, OUP,
Cambridge, Springer, Sage, etc., etc.), the service provider has not
involvement with editorial selection.  Consider the alternative:
would anyone want a service provider to be telling the professional
societies whose journals they host and distribute what to publish?

Assigning responsibility in a situation like this is complicated.  But
once again we should thank Bohannon for making everybody pay
attention.

Joe Esposito


On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 5:17 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Kevin Smith <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 01:06:05 +0000
>
> This isn't quite what I intended to say.  I would assert that on the
> basis of Bohannon's sting, we are not justified in calling these
> journals predatory in the first place.  We simply don't have enough
> evidence for that, or the right kind of evidence.  If acceptance of
> Bohannon's bogus paper makes a publisher predatory, then Elsevier and
> Sage belong on Jeffrey's list.
>
> Kevin
>
> Kevin L. Smith, J.D.
> Director of Scholarly Communication
> Duke University Libraries
> Durham, NC 27708
>
>
> > On Oct 17, 2013, at 5:24 PM, "LIBLICENSE" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > From: "Beall, Jeffrey" <[log in to unmask]>
> > Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 19:08:59 -0600
> >
> > Kevin's right; excellent research can indeed appear in predatory
> > journals; I have observed this. Predatory publishers do their best to
> > appear legitimate, and they do everything they can to fool honest
> > researchers into submitting papers to their journals. Sometimes they
> > are successful, and a good researcher submits a novel and interesting
> > paper to them, which they accept and publish.
> >
> > Predatory publishers don't discriminate; they want bad papers and good
> > ones, as long as they can collect the APC.
> >
> > Jeffrey Beall, MA, MSLS, Associate Professor
> > Scholarly Initiatives Librarian
> > Auraria Library
> > University of Colorado Denver
> > Denver, Colo.  80204 USA
> > [log in to unmask]
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> >
> > From: Kevin Smith <[log in to unmask]>
> > Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 12:40:49 +0000
> >
> > Surely it is a massive and unjustified leap to go from saying that a
> > journal accepted Bohannon's bogus paper to calling that entire journal
> > bogus or suggesting that none of the contents of any of these journals
> > could have value.
> >
> > I have been looking at and considering the Journal of Natural
> > Pharmaceuticals.  A quick look at PubMed and PubMed Central suggest
> > that neither index includes that journal, which was the one Bohannon
> > focused on in the beginning of his expose.  But as I point out in this
> > blog post -- http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2013/10/10/the-big-picture-about-peer-review/
> > -- two major indexes for general academic research, one from Gale and
> > one from EBSCO, do include it.   And we simply have no basis for
> > concluding that every article published in that journal is compromised
> > by the apparent fact that Bohannon's article was accepted.  The web
> > site Retraction Watch lists a recent retraction of an article that was
> > published in Stem Cells and Development, a journal published by Mary
> > Ann Liebert which I am confident is indexed in PubMed and PubMed
> > Central.  But surely not every article published in that journal is
> > tainted by the one retraction?
> >
> > I am fascinated by some of the cultural assumptions at work in this
> > discussion.  When the open access community gathered in Stellenbosch
> > last year for the Berlin 10 Conference, one of the themes we heard
> > repeatedly was that research done in Africa by Africans about African
> > issues was unavailable to the people of Africa because it was
> > published in Western/Northern journals that were unaffordable for
> > African universities.  The new business models of open access offer
> > opportunities to resolve that problem, but they clearly need to
> > develop and work out their problems, just as subscription-based
> > journal publishing did several centuries ago.  But instead we see
> > carefully orchestrated and "cooked" sting operations like Bohannon's
> > (who pretended that his article was written by an African) designed to
> > undermine those journals before they can get well-established.  It is
> > ironic that Bohannon controlled for the possibility that his "native
> > English" might give the game away (what an assumption!) but not for
> > the possibility that subscription-based journals in the developed
> > world might also have accepted his paper.
> >
> > There is an interesting discussion to be had about what exactly
> > peer-review can really tell us and how we might resolve the bias in
> > current academic publishing for well-capitalized operations in the
> > developed world, with their apparent desire to slay all challengers to
> > their dominance.  There is lots to say.  But one thing we cannot say
> > is that Bohannon's journalistic sting operation has shown that all of
> > the research published in all the journals he targets is bogus.
> >
> > Kevin L. Smith, M.L.S., J.D.
> > Director, Copyright and Scholarly Communication Duke University
> > Libraries Durham, NC  27708 [log in to unmask]