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]


-----Original Message-----

From: Philip Davis <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 09:42:11 -0400

Apologies if I missed this thread, but has a librarian taken the 158
titles that accepted Bohannon's bogus paper and figured out whether
they are indexed in PubMed or are archived in PubMed Central? I'm not
concerned that vanity journals exist in the first place (they will
always exist), but would be extremely worried if organizations, like
the National Library of Medicine, gives these journals
credibility--and the articles published therein authority--by being
hosted in PMC. If they were, the NLM would need to consider whether
delisting their journal and purging their content is appropriate.

The titles that accepted (and rejected) the bogus paper are listed in
Bohannon's supplementary data.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60/suppl/DC1

Thank you,
Phil Davis