Bona Fide Journals – Creating a predatory-free academic publishing environment

[Elizabeth Gadd]

Members of the OSI list might be interested in this initiative from CWTS Leiden and the Quality Open Access Market (QOAM).

 

https://leidenmadtrics.nl/articles/bona-fide-journals-creating-a-predatory-free-academic-publishing-environment

 

All best

Lizzie

 

Dr Elizabeth Gadd FHEA

Research Policy Manager (Publications)

Research and Enterprise Office

Loughborough University

Loughborough, Leics, UK, LE11 3TU

 

Chair, INORMS Research Evaluation Working Group

Chair, Lis-Bibliometrics

Champion, ARMA Research Evaluation SIG

 

Phone: +44 (0)1509228594

Twitter: @lizziegadd

Web: https://lizziegadd.wordpress.com/

Working hours: M: 8.30-5/ Tu: 8.30-5/ W: 8.30-5/ F: 8.30-3

 

[Glenn Hampson]

Thanks Lizzie! Yes---nice approach. The OSI group put something like this on their wish list a few years ago---essentially a Yelp site for publishing where community reviews and rankings can help identify the bad actors. Like this Leiden effort, we’re just hoping for a little help from people who believe in the need and are willing to commit the startup funds (which isn’t a whole lot, especially considering that this site should be profitable after a few years).

 

Cheers,

 

Glenn

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[Williams Nwagwu]

Each time I see a new stuff touching on global issues about OA, I struggle to fit Africa into the scheme of things. I can tell ahead of time the end of the Bona Fide Journal project. Most African journals will be found guilty of predation. African scholars cannot afford the ground work scholars in the developed world do before establishing a journal, the cost involved, access and availability of technology. This is an over-flogged issue that rears up its head all the time. Many African scholars do not even care what scholars in the developed world say about their work – they simply can’t afford to do things differently, and they just do what they can. See, I observe that the so called predatory journal publishing is on the rise in many developing regions. 

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[Williams Nwagwu]

We also often assign roles to libraries that I find many African universities libraries incapable of playing. Many libraries just give you what you want and users are also structured that way.

[Elizabeth Gadd]

Yes, these are really important points, Williams. The varying roles of libraries in different parts of the world probably hasn’t been factored into this model.  I’m in touch with the authors about this work so I’ll forward your point on, if I may.

 

On your point about DOIs, Glenn, I think this isn’t the best marker of “good”, simply due to the cost of providing DOIs. I’m currently finalising our UK Research Excellence Framework submission and am getting up-close-and-personal with a wide disciplinary range of outputs, and it’s surprised me how many don’t have DOIs. When I queried this on Twitter it transpired that many smaller, independent publishers found the effort and cost prohibitive.

 

All best

Lizzie

 

 

From: Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org>
Sent: 04 March 2021 16:18
To: 'Williams Nwagwu' <will...@yahoo.com>; Elizabeth Gadd <E.A....@lboro.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Bona Fide Journals – Creating a predatory-free academic publishing environment

 

Excellent point Williams. I guess a system like this would eventually end up making the big publishers look glamorous and the small ones look, well, small. But I think the intent is/was to help identify the regional, specialty, and even “off the radar” publishers that are actually doing a good job via the reviews they receive. By “good,” I’m not talking here about bells and whistles, but doing a competent job of review, editing and archiving, putting out regular issues, making sure articles have DOIs, making sure the journal is indexed somewhere, etc. It’s important here to distinguish between these journals and the predatory ones---the ones that take money but don’t publish anything, or lie about their editorial boards or impact factors in order to lure in authors, for example. Here’s a link to Rick’s issue brief on this to make sure we’re all defining “predatory” (or “deceptive”) in the same way: Issue Brief 3: Deceptive Publishing | Open Scholarship Initiative Proceedings (gmu.edu).

 

Best,

 

Glenn

 

 

From: Williams Nwagwu <will...@yahoo.com>
Sent: 04 March 2021 08:38
To: Elizabeth Gadd <E.A....@lboro.ac.uk>; osi20...@googlegroups.com; Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org>
Subject: Re: Bona Fide Journals – Creating a predatory-free academic publishing environment

 

We also often assign roles to libraries that I find many African universities libraries incapable of playing. Many libraries just give you what you want and users are also structured that way.

.
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[Pippa Smart]

And I can recommend William's article published in Learned Publishing (COI, I am EiC) with more on this subject  - 

NWAGWU, W.E. (2015), Counterpoints about predatory open access and knowledge publishing in Africa. Learned Publishing, 28: 114-122. https://doi.org/10.1087/20150205

Pippa

*****
Pippa Smart
Research Communication and Publishing Consultant
PSP Consulting, Oxford, UK
email: pippa...@gmail.com
Web: www.pspconsulting.org
@LearnedPublish
****
Editor-in-Chief of Learned Publishing (www.Learned-Publishing.org)
Past-President: European Association of Science Editors (http://www.ease.org.uk/)

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[Williams Nwagwu]

Thanks Pippa. And of course 

Nwagwu WE (2018). Knowledge Production Ethos and Open Access Publishing: Africa in Focus. Canadian Journal of Information and Library Studies 42, no. 3–4.

 

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[David Wojick]

This proposed system has libraries doing the certification. Why would libraries know anything about electronic OA journals? OA eliminates libraries as the subscription paying intermediary between the journal and the scholar.

David

On Mar 3, 2021, at 12:48 PM, Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org> wrote:



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[Simon Linacre]

I have my own questions about how the proposal might work in practice, but this certainly has nothing to do with libraries' knowledge about OA journals. The idea that OA somehow disintermediates librarians and journals is rather dated, as libraries have been at the forefront of curating both OA and subscription content for many universities as access to research has been transformed, with the library essential at the centre of a knowledge hub. While the transactional element is being (very gradually) removed, the enabling of both push and pull elements of OA has been accelerated by libraries, and therefore they would be the only real agents within an academic institution to try and implement the proposal.

Thanks, Simon

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From: osi20...@googlegroups.com <osi20...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of David Wojick <dwo...@craigellachie.us>
Sent: 05 March 2021 12:08
To: Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org>
Cc: Elizabeth Gadd <E.A....@lboro.ac.uk>; osi20...@googlegroups.com <osi20...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Bona Fide Journals – Creating a predatory-free academic publishing environment

 

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[Williams Nwagwu]

Again we are being cosmopolitan about an issue that responds to environmental and other factors. The idea that "... push and pull elements of OA has been accelerated by libraries, and therefore they would be the only real agents within an academic institution to try and implement the proposal" is not universal. In much of Africa, individual information consumers are largely responsible for choosing what they consume, and hardly ever does the library come into this role. 

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[Simon Linacre]

Thank you, Williams for (rightly) calling out my cosmopolitan bias, and while my earlier caveat of 'many libraries' in my comment was meant to recognise that this trend was far from universal, it is worth underlining how varied the adoption and facilitation of OA is among libraries and their academic scholars. I would maintain, however, that libraries could and should play a key part in this kind of proposal

---

From: Williams Nwagwu <will...@yahoo.com>
Sent: 05 March 2021 11:21
To: David Wojick <dwo...@craigellachie.us>; Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org>; Simon Linacre <simon....@cabells.com>
Cc: Elizabeth Gadd <e.a....@lboro.ac.uk>; osi20...@googlegroups.com <osi20...@googlegroups.com>

[David Wojick]

Are you saying the library knows which OA journals its school's faculty and students are reading? How can it know that?

David

[Lisa Hinchliffe]

Publishers send us this data. 

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe
lisali...@gmail.com

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[Lisa Hinchliffe]

Maybe I'm missing something but this project doesn't actually ever label something predatory as far as I can tell. Librarians can vouch for trustworthiness but the is (seemingly) no recording of "I investigated and it isn't trustworthy" ... which I think ultimately means such journals live on "unmarked" as do many other small and non-fraudulent journals.

Which is why I am also very puzzled by the claim this will create a predatory-free environment.  How?

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe
lisali...@gmail.com

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[David Wojick]

Surely only the major publishers, and the major libraries. And if people use their personal computers how do they know they are students or faculty someplace?

David

On Mar 5, 2021, at 9:13 AM, Lisa Hinchliffe <lisali...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Lisa Hinchliffe]

I'll trust that you can find articles online about the technologies that enable this but FWIW arXiv has done a nice job explaining its approach and how they ID readers if you want to look at a particular case. 

Anyway, ultimately, librarians assess journals all the time regardless of whether we are paying for them as subscriptions. In fact, in many cases, especially when we are not to decide if we should start. We advise on whether journals should be incorporated into discovery indexes. Etc. Etc. The business model has nothing to  do with our expertise in assessing  publications for whether they are trustworthy and worth including in a collection. We do this drawing on a large number of data sources, understanding of disciplinary knowledge epistemologies, etc. I don't see any reason why we'd be unable to bring our expertise to OA journals, particularly given we've been doing so for decades now.

One might debate whether librarians SHOULD do this. But, it is empirically the case that we DO do this. 

___

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe
lisali...@gmail.com

[Glenn Hampson]

Heavy sigh…alas, you’re right Lizzie. I thought DOIs were like bit.ly links (why aren’t they anyway?)--- Learning a lot this week…. Thanks too for the extra reading, Pippa and Williams.

 

Happy Friday from the US left coast (where the day is just getting started),

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[Williams Nwagwu]

Any time I read David's opinions, I often see him as my next door neighbour here in the small village of Laniba, 15 minutes drive to the University of Ibadan. Thanks David. We must distinguish between the way we do things and the way things are done (pardon my UnEnglish English). I am referring to the difference between professional fixations and actual consumer behavior - this is evident everywhere including in medicine. The librarian is busy selecting ad evaluating journals for discovery index, but the user is making use of the information he or she can get from his or her corner without necessarily contacting the library's discovery index - from the internet really. Do I really need to contact the library before sending a paper to a journal for publishing? No! I establish the status of any journal right on my own and then decide whether to use the journal or not. 

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