From: "Smith, Kevin L" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2017 12:55:35 +0000

I agree about the various motives authors have for deciding where to
publish.  I was quite surprised the couple of times when I turned down
an application to Duke’s OA fund because the journal did not meet the
standards for the fund and was considered “predatory,” only to have
the author thank me but say that they still thought the journal was
the right place for their article, even without funding assistance.

In general I think we in the library and publishing world are too
ready to think in terms of categories like predatory v. respectable.
My major complaint about Beall’s list is that it fostered this kind of
thinking.  There is actually a continuum of predatory practices in
academic publishing.  Some are caused by outright dishonesty, while
others may be the result of incompetence or inexperience.  And such
predatory practices are found in all business models; librarians long
been aware of subscription journals where peer-review is dubious or
publication schedules are unreliable.  These publishers also take
money -- from institutions rather than directly from authors -- and do
not meet the expected standards.  Are these not also predatory
practices?

Instead of replicating Beall’s list, which lacked both the scope and
the nuance needed to define the problem, perhaps we should be building
a database that tracks specific practices and problems.  In that way
we could assist librarians and individual authors about what, exactly,
they should look out for regarding particular titles or publishers.

I believe a lot more value could be realized if we talked about
practices in publishing rather than confined ourselves to rigid and
unhelpful “buckets.”

Kevin L. Smith, J.D.
Dean of Libraries
University of Kansas

******

From: Mary Summerfield <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2017 03:31:11 +0000

There was a good preconference session on predatory publishing at the
SSP annual meeting that made this point well. Authors have lots of
motivations; some know what they are doing when they work with
'predatory' publishers but their needs are served by them. But surely
the other side of the story of researchers who do not understand the
nature of the 'predatory' publishers to whom they submit manuscripts
is also true.

Mary Summerfield
Manager, SPIE Publications Business Development


________________________________________

From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2017 08:06:50 -0400

Thank you for this comment, Colette. It seems to me to pretty much hit
the bullseye.

Joe Esposito


On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 6:48 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Collette Mak <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2017 08:41:00 -0400
>
> thanks(!) for posting, I don't know how I missed that!
>
> There's no question that he comes across as a bitter, venom-spitting curmudgeon in that opinion piece but it reminded me that we do owe him a debt of gratitude for shining a spotlight on the very real issue of predatory publishers and on the potential threat to the rigor of scholarly publishing.  I disagree with him (and with the excellent LSE blog on SciHub) that it's a failure of publishing.  I think it's more a failure of promotion/tenure to have kept pace with a rapidly changing scholarly communications environment. If you're going to be graded on publications then people going to want to publish, Adam Smith's invisible hand is going to meet that market demand.
>
> Guess it's my day to be the curmudgeon and, BTW, get off my lawn
>
> Collette
>
> Collette Mak
> Outreach and Scholarly Communications Librarian
> Hesburgh Libraries
>
> University of Notre Dame
> 159 Hesburgh Library
> Notre Dame, IN 46556
> o: 574-631-7392
> e: [log in to unmask]
> orcid: 0000-0003-4563-8545