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Jeffrey Beall

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Jeffrey Beall
NationalityAmerican
Alma materCalifornia State University, Northridge, Oklahoma State University, University of North Carolina
OccupationLibrarian at the University of Colorado, Denver
Known forCriticism of predatory open access publishing
WebsiteScholarly Open Access: scholarlyoa.com

Jeffrey Beall is a librarian and associate professor at Auraria Library at the University of Colorado, Denver. He originated the phrase “predatory open access” and has been a high profile critic of the open access publishing movement. He maintains a blog which monitors predatory open access publishers, and is a prominent critic of them. Some of his views are contentious and not backed up by rigorous research.

Education and career

Beall has a bachelor's degree in Spanish from California State University, Northridge (1982), as well as an MA in English from Oklahoma State University (1987) and an MSc in library science from the University of North Carolina (1990). Until December 2012, Beall served on the editorial board of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. In that same year, he was awarded tenure by UC-Denver. In an interview with The Charleston Advisor in July 2013, Beall said that his biggest influence was Fred Kilgour. Beall maintains a blog on open access publishing, Scholarly Open Access.

Beall's Criticisms of open access publishing

Beall is convinced that "The only truly successful model that I have seen is the traditional publishing model." In December 2013, Beall published a comment in tripleC, an open access journal, in which he articulated his criticism of open access publishing in general. He portrays open access publishing as an anti-corporatist movement whose advocates pursue the goal of "kill off the for-profit publishers and mak scholarly publishing a cooperative and socialistic enterprise". Further, he considers that the "open access movement is a Euro-dominant one, a neo-colonial attempt to cast scholarly communication policy according to the aspirations of a cliquish minority of European collectivists". According to Beall, "the emergence of numerous predatory publishers” has been “a product of the open-access movement".

Beall's Criticisms of predatory open access publishing

Beall has been a librarian for 22 years and is well known for his opposition to predatory open access publishing, a term he coined. He has published a number of analyses of predatory OA journals such as one of Bentham Open in The Charleston Advisor in 2009. However, his interest in such journals began when, in 2008, he started to receive numerous requests from dubious journals to serve on their editorial boards. He has said that he "immediately became fascinated because most of the e-mails contained numerous grammatical errors." He has since produced a well-known and regularly updated list of what he states are "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". Beall has estimated that predatory open access journals publish about 5-10 percent of all open access articles, and that at least 25 percent of open access journals are predatory.

Counterpoints to Beall's Criticisms

Wayne Bivens-Tatum, librarian at Princeton University, published a rebuttal in tripleC, regarding Beall's criticisms of open access publishing, stating that Beall's "rhetoric provides good examples of what Albert O. Hirschman called the 'rhetoric of reaction'" (see The Rhetoric of Reaction). Bivens-Tatum concludes Beall's "argument fails because the sweeping generalizations with no supporting evidence render it unsound." Beall has been criticized by London School of Economics librarians, for bias against open-access journals from less economically developed countries: for example, responding to one of Beall's arguments, Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella state that “imperfect English or a predominantly non-Western editorial board does not make a journal predatory”.

Beall's list and Science sting

In 2013, Science published the results of a "sting operation" in which a scientifically flawed spoof publication was submitted to open access publications. Many accepted the manuscript, and a disproportionate number of the accepting journals were on Beall's list. The publication, entitled Who's Afraid of Peer Review?, stated that "The results show that Beall is good at spotting publishers with poor quality control: For the publishers on his list that completed the review process, 82% accepted the paper." Beall agreed, saying that the author of the sting, John Bohannon, "basically found what I've been saying for years."

In a more recent test of this evolving system of publishing (Who's Afraid of Peer Review?), a staff writer for Science magazine and popular science publications targeted the open access system in 2013 by submitting to a number of such journals a deeply flawed paper on the purported effect of a lichen constituent. About 60% of those journals, including the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, accepted the faked medical paper, although PLOS ONE, the most established one, did reject it . As a result, this experiment was criticised for being not peer-reviewed itself and for having a flawed methodology and lack of a control group.

Legal threats

In February 2013, the open-access publisher Canadian Center for Science and Education sent a letter to Beall stating that Beall's inclusion of their company on his list of questionable open-access publishers amounted to defamation. The letter also stated that if Beall did not remove this company from his list, they would subject him to "civil action".

In May 2013, it was reported that OMICS Publishing Group, which had also been included on Beall's list of predatory open access publishers, had issued a warning to Beall stating that they intended to sue him, and were seeking $1 billion in damages. In their six-pages-long letter, OMICS stated that Beall's blog is "ridiculous, baseless, impertinent," and "smacks of literal unprofessionalism and arrogance." Beall was quoted as saying that he found the letter "to be poorly written and personally threatening," and that he thought "...the letter is an attempt to detract from the enormity of OMICS's editorial practices."

References

  1. "Beall's Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). auraria.edu. Auraria Library. Retrieved 25 November 2013.
  2. "About the Author". Scholarly Open Access.
  3. Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.5260/chara.15.1.50, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.5260/chara.15.1.50 instead.
  4. Elliott, Carl (June 5, 2012). "On Predatory Publishers: a Q&A With Jeffrey Beall". Brainstorm. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
  5. Beall, Jeffrey (2013). "The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access". tripleC. 11 (2): 589–597. Retrieved 27 March 2014.
  6. Beall, Jeffrey (September 2009). "Bentham Open". The Charleston Advisor. 11 (1): 29–32.
  7. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1038/495433a, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1038/495433a instead.
  8. "LIST OF PUBLISHERS". Scholarly Open Access. Retrieved 2014-01-18.
  9. Kolata, Gina (7 April 2013). "Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too)". New York Times. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
  10. Harbison, Martha (9 April 2013). "Bogus Academic Conferences Lure Scientists". Popular Science. Retrieved 31 January 2015.
  11. Bivens-Tatum, Wayne (2014). "Reactionary Rhetoric Against Open Access Publishing". tripleC. 12 (2): 441–446.
  12. Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella. “Beyond Beall’s List: Better Understanding Predatory Publishers.” College & Research Libraries News 76.3 (2015): 132-5. http://crln.acrl.org/content/76/3/132.long Retrieved 1 August 2015.
  13. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite pmid}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by PMID 24092725, please use {{cite journal}} with |pmid=24092725 instead.
  14. Knox, Richard (3 October 2013). "Some Online Journals Will Publish Fake Science, For A Fee". NPR. Retrieved 3 May 2014.
  15. John Bohannon. "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?". Sciencemag.org. Retrieved 2013-10-07
  16. Eve, Martin (3 October 2013). "What’s “open” got to do with it?". Martin Eve. Retrieved 7 October 2013
  17. Michael, Eisen (3 October 2013). "I confess, I wrote the Arsenic DNA paper to expose flaws in peer-review at subscription based journals". it is NOT junk. Retrieved 7 October 2013
  18. Flaherty, Colleen (15 February 2013). "Librarians and Lawyers". Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 8 December 2014.
  19. New, Jake (15 May 2013). "Publisher Threatens to Sue Blogger for $1-Billion". Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
  20. Chappell, Bill (15 May 2013). "Publisher Threatens Librarian With $1 Billion Lawsuit". NPR. Retrieved 18 January 2014.

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