Green Tea and Velociraptors

A journalist approached me yesterday, and asked the question: “I’d like to know what you think about [journal/publisher] blacklists and whether you would pay for one?” I can’t reveal too much about the context just yet (see here), but it was regarding the release of a new ‘blacklist’ this month by a company called Cabell’s Publishing Services (see this Twitter thread). Predatory publishing and blacklists aren’t something I’ve dedicated too much thought to yet, so I spent some time processing it and kinda subjected her to a total brain dump of thoughts. See also this excellent post by Cameron Neylon. Here’s my response posted in full:

——

So I would never pay for a blacklist service. I think there are much more suitable services out there that also teach us about issues with publishing, while providing an alternative way of helping researchers decide about suitable venues for publishing. These include the DOAJ (Directory of OA Journals) and ‘Think, Check, Submit‘, or Walt Crawford’s ‘GOAJ‘ service (well documented and with open data) for example (also services like PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, ScienceOpen..). Criteria for inclusion here, and even the raw data, are often provided making them at least consistent and valid, compared to a closed blacklist.

I think there is also a huge conflict of interest in having a publishing services company operating something like this. Any sort of list should be maintained by and for the scholarly community really. Journals have to be certified or pass a certain quality check, like with the DOAJ, in order to make any sort of ‘whitelist’. Blacklists will never be complete as they can never satisfy this simple criterion. By having a publisher maintain this service, it will be naturally disciminatory against other publishers which challenge them – those which are innovating in some way, thereby stifling any new entrants to the market. Which is exactly what publishers want. This is fine if the blacklist is specifically targeting individuals who are practicing ‘predatory’ behaviour, but not if those criteria are blindly applied to others who are acting legitimately. Transparency will be key here.

In reality, ‘predatory publishers’ are a bit of an overblown issue too. For details, see the section ‘Deceptive publishing practices’ here. A much more valuable thing would be to provide a regulatory service to publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, and Taylor and Francis, who operate based on behaviours remarkably similar to extortion and racketeering, yet legal, to hold a monopoly over an unregulated publishing market (see here and here). “Predatory publishing” is really just a distraction from these much larger issues in my views. What’s the real threat? A handful of bad pseudo-publishers that sucker in a negligible fraction of the research community with very little real, negative consequences ultimately, or the corporate empire that sucks $billions out of public universities each year to sustain it’s bloated 35%+ profit margins by leveraging the free labour of academics and breaking the backs of our financially-drained libraries. The name of the game here is distraction.

What I would like to see finances being directed towards are more training services to teach those at most risk for falling for predatory publishers more about the ethics surrounding scholarly publishing (e.g., those from lesser economically developed countries, students). More awareness of these issues means that we lose the need for a blacklist of any sort. What we want is an informed scholarly community who are able to make decisions on where to publish themselves – I mean, that’s what we should be doing as researchers anyway, making evidence-informed evaluations. If we can’t do that, and need blacklists to help, then we probably don’t deserve to call ourselves researchers.