{"id":1911,"date":"2015-08-01T17:32:01","date_gmt":"2015-08-01T20:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/?p=1911"},"modified":"2015-09-17T14:48:19","modified_gmt":"2015-09-17T17:48:19","slug":"the-fenced-off-nice-publication-neighbourhoods-of-jeffrey-beall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/2015\/08\/01\/the-fenced-off-nice-publication-neighbourhoods-of-jeffrey-beall\/","title":{"rendered":"The fenced-off \u2018nice\u2019 publication neighbourhoods of Jeffrey Beall"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jan Velterop<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Open<\/a><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Beall, librarian at the Auraria Library of the University of Colorado in Denver, recently published a post on his blog entitled \u201cIs SciELO a Publication\u00a0Favela?\u201d1<\/sup> In his blog post, he contrasts the \u2018publication favela\u2019 with the \u2018nice neighbourhoods for scholarly publications\u2019, the latter being commercial publisher platforms and the former platforms like those of SciELO.<\/p>\n

We know Beall mainly from his list of \u2018predatory\u2019 journals and publishers2,3<\/sup>. That list shows not only a strong bias against open access, but also against any journal or publisher that is owned by or run by non-Anglo-Americans or other non-Westerners. His list contains publishers and journals that have \u2018American\u2019 or \u2018European\u2019 in their titles, Beall nonetheless seems to associate quality primarily with American and European owned publishers. Cameron Neylon, a much more diplomatic person than I am, expressed it like this on Twitter: \u201cThere is [a] definite undercurrent of cultural bias\/imperialism, sometimes shading to racism, around ideas of quality in schol[arly] comm[unication]s.\u201d4<\/sup> And it is not just about quality: by calling the publishers on his list \u2018predatory\u2019 he accuses them of unethical behaviour. I am sure there are unethical publishers in his list, but Beall\u2019s definition of \u2018predatory\u2019 is peculiar, to say the least. The publishers and journals on his list are exclusively open access ones, as if unethical behaviour, taking payment \u2013 or requiring copyright transfer \u2013 from authors without offering much of value in return, is the province of open access only. Yet the commercial subscription publishers and their journals that do that are not on Beall\u2019s list.<\/p>\n

Researchers who need to publish (\u201cpublish-or-perish\u201d, remember) are in many ways a vulnerable lot, and getting them to submit their articles by luring them into the trap called \u2018prestige journals\u2019 for journals that are anything but, and simply published by a widely known publisher \u2013 stripping them of their copyright in the process \u2013 is as much \u2018predatory\u2019 behaviour as open access journals making them pay Article Processing Charges.<\/p>\n

The \u2018nice neighbourhoods\u2019 and \u2018favelas\u2019 in Beall\u2019s world do differ in one important respect: exaggerated, and even false, claims of \u2018prestige\u2019 are non-existent on the SciELO platform, or at worst very rare; they are rife, on the other hand, in the \u2018nice neighbourhoods\u2019 of commercial platforms.<\/p>\n

One of the main criticisms in Bell\u2019s post is the idea that the SciELO platform is doing a poor job of distributing the journals\u2019 content or increasing their visibility. He is plain wrong on both counts, but he probably means that they don\u2019t spend much on actively promoting the journals and their content. If that is what he means, he may have a point. However, neither do all but very few of the journals from his commercial \u2018nice neighbourhood\u2019. He may also well be right that \u201cmany North American scholars have never even heard of these meta-publishers or the journals they aggregate.\u201d Again, that, too, is true for most commercially published journals. I am convinced that most professional and diligent academic librarians in North America \u2013 and elsewhere for that matter \u2013 are well aware of SciELO. Some \u2013 though very few, one hopes \u2013 may choose not to share that awareness with their patrons. That\u2019s not SciELO\u2019s fault, obviously.<\/p>\n

Academics worth their salt will look critically at Beall\u2019s utterances, as they do with any information they come across, and then ignore his opinions. Those who do take him seriously and ignore SciELO are free to do so. It\u2019s their right. And their loss.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/h3>\n

1. BEALL, J. Is SciELO a Publication Favela?<\/em> Scholarly Open Access. 2015. Available from: http:\/\/scholarlyoa.com\/2015\/07\/30\/is-scielo-a-publication-favela\/<\/a><\/p>\n

2. BEALL, J. List of publishers.<\/em> Scholarly Open Access. 2015. Available from: http:\/\/scholarlyoa.com\/publishers\/<\/a><\/p>\n

3. BEALL, J. List of standalone journals.<\/em> Scholarly Open Access. 2015. Available from: http:\/\/scholarlyoa.com\/individual-journals\/<\/a><\/p>\n

4. NEYLON, C. Twitter post<\/em>. Available from: http:\/\/twitter.com\/cameronneylon\/status\/627125354570846209<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

About\u00a0Jan Velterop<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a> Jan Velterop (1949), marine geophysicist who became a science publisher in the mid-1970s. He started his publishing career at Elsevier in Amsterdam. in 1990 he became director of a Dutch newspaper, but returned to international science publishing in 1993 at Academic Press in London, where he developed the first country-wide deal that gave electronic access to all AP journals to all institutes of higher education in the United Kingdom (later known as the BigDeal). He next joined Nature as director, but moved quickly on to help get BioMed Central off the ground. He participated in the Budapest Open Access Initiative. In 2005 he joined Springer, based in the UK as Director of Open Access. In 2008 he left to help further develop semantic approaches to accelerate scientific discovery. He is an active advocate of BOAI-compliant open access and of the use of microattribution, the hallmark of so-called \u201cnanopublications\u201d. He published several articles on both topics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeffrey Beall, librarian at the University of Colorado, describes SciELO as a \u2018publication favela\u2019 and commercial publishers as \u2018nice neighbourhoods for scholarly publications\u2019. The only way for us to understand that is if we consider his anti-open access, anti-subsidy, and anti-non-western attitudes, which are so clearly visible in his writings. It is a pity a university librarian of an otherwise reputable university thinks like this. He is wrong, and that has to be exposed. …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":1912,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[37,31,7,9],"class_list":["post-1911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","tag-ethics-in-scholarly-communication","tag-research-evaluation","tag-scholarly-communication","tag-scielo-program"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1911"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1980,"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911\/revisions\/1980"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}