The answer to Jim O'Donnell's question lies perhaps in abandoning the ranking perspective altogether. For one thing, this ranking refers to very ambiguous (not to say more) characteristics of journals. Instead, it would be much more useful to establish a quality-threshold that journals should respect in order to be considered as legitimate. Such a threshold could be patterned after the criteria used, for example, by Latindex in latin America (a liste of criteria can be found here:
http://www.latindex.org/latindex/descCampos). It should be managed transparently and openly.
The advantage of such a system is that it would not divide the publishing world according to the whims of WoS or Scopus, but according to the transparent criteria agreed to by a number of well-recognized universities in the world (and not located only or mainly in the northern hemisphere, by the way).
Just a thought...
Jean-Claude Guédon
Le mardi 31 octobre 2017 à 20:06 -0400, LIBLICENSE a écrit :
From: "Jim O'Donnell" <
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Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2017 13:13:17 -0700
I'm always happy to deal with FDIC-insured banks, but there are other kinds, and lots of people wind up getting the money they need from payday lenders. Scientific publishing offers a spectrum as well, and as I see things like this I realize that a binary good/bad, virtuous/predatory frame of reference is perhaps a place to start thinking about the issues, but not a good place to end.
If it's unlikely that you can magically eradicate the ones who fall on the predatory side of whatever quality-ranking scale you prefer to look at, what could we actually do to move authors over to the good side of the scale and the move the dividing line between good and bad in a useful direction. Where are the journals in the middle that could be influenced?
Jim O'Donnell
Arizona State U.