Re:Librarian removes controversial list of "predatory" journ...
by FabHK on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @09:22PM
(#13477879)
2) why the market failure?
Because the scientific reputation (and career prospects) are tied to publications in reputable journals, to certain titles. And the titles belong to the publishers. There has been considerable consolidation over time, the big 4 or 5 have just bought up smaller publishers over time, and it's now run not by idealistic academics, but (by all appearances) by cold-blooded money guys trying to squeeze out as much as they can.
Competitors can't just enter - there's a signalling problem: how do you distinguish scientists that don't publish in the top journal because they're idealistically opposed to their closed-access practices, from those that cannot get published there because their work is not up to standards?
1) Open Access Journals: the editors do some editing and vetting, and, crucially, peer review. If you put an article on your website, it doesn't have the same standing, "it doesn't count" as a real article or for your publication list.
So, in terms of scientific reputation, for now:
Traditional journal > OA journal > self-published.
The challenge is to get OA >= traditional, and that takes a lot of time, or, rather, coordination:
Don Knuth sent a letter in 2003 to the editors of the Journal of Algorithms to persuade them to collectively resign and move to a different journal. People of that stature are needed to break the power of despicable academic publishers (Elsevier is particularly revolting, btw.)
Because the scientific reputation (and career prospects) are tied to publications in reputable journals, to certain titles. And the titles belong to the publishers. There has been considerable consolidation over time, the big 4 or 5 have just bought up smaller publishers over time, and it's now run not by idealistic academics, but (by all appearances) by cold-blooded money guys trying to squeeze out as much as they can.
Competitors can't just enter - there's a signalling problem: how do you distinguish scientists that don't publish in the top journal because they're idealistically opposed to their closed-access practices, from those that cannot get published there because their work is not up to standards?
1) Open Access Journals: the editors do some editing and vetting, and, crucially, peer review. If you put an article on your website, it doesn't have the same standing, "it doesn't count" as a real article or for your publication list.
So, in terms of scientific reputation, for now:
Traditional journal > OA journal > self-published.
The challenge is to get OA >= traditional, and that takes a lot of time, or, rather, coordination:
Don Knuth sent a letter in 2003 to the editors of the Journal of Algorithms to persuade them to collectively resign and move to a different journal. People of that stature are needed to break the power of despicable academic publishers (Elsevier is particularly revolting, btw.)
See
http://theoryofcomputing.org/crisis.html
Here some more background:
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/08/17/deceptive-pub...
(So, Beall's was a black list, and the DOAJ has sort of a white list.)