From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]> Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 08:45:10 +0100 I think there may have been some misunderstandings here. My experience of interviewing academics over the last two months has been and the conclusions I draw are: 1. The activities of the publishers that Beall has listed has been really and unfairly damaging to Open Access as a whole. Academics seem to believe that is a systemic fault following from paying to publish. Note that I do not believe this: I am recording. I have yet to meet an academic who has complained about recently being pressed to publish in, referee for or go on the editorial board of a subscription journal whether new or old. I think DOAJ is correct in taking note of this. I think Beall is doing a service to Open Access. 2. Likewise in discussion about peer review quite a number of academics have described circumstances when they are encouraged and even (much less common) forced to cite other (supposedly relevant) articles previously published in a journal they have submitted an article to. My understanding is that most of these journals are established subscription based journals though I did not ask this question directly. I have read through the comment in Nature and the original statement from ISI and I do not see a definition of self-citation but my understanding was that this form of gaming involves citation by an author in a journal of other articles published in a journal not (as Joe seems to think) citation of one’s own previous articles. For many years there has been discussion at least in publishing and academic circles about how far one can go in encouraging self-citation in this sense (compelling has always been frowned upon): there is no secret here. It now seems to be generally felt that editors should be discouraged (prevented?) by publishers from adopting the practice of offering to the submitting author a list of articles they might site. I happen to have different views from Kevin. I do not want to force authors to have to publish open access through mandates. But this is a different question. I have however nothing against nor ever had any objection to the open access model only doubts about its sustainability in economic terms. I can give references if anyone was interested. I am certainly against the OA model as such being trashed. Anthony From: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Joseph Esposito Sent: 24 June 2013 00:33 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: From Nature: 66 journals banned for boosting impact factor with self-citations I would be astonished to discover that self-citation is restricted to OA publications, so Kevin and I find ourselves in the unfamiliar situation of agreeing with one another. But there is a different question buried here: is the problem self-citation or the inclusion of self-citation in measuring impact? I would think that self-citation is a natural act, like admiring your own children, but there is no reason to include these citations in measuring impact. Joe Esposito On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 4:54 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote: 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 [log in to unmask] -----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)