Page 11 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

Data limitations

Jeffrey Beall’s verdict is solely based on his own judgement. He does not seem to consult
anyone. However, keeping track of such a large number of cases is a tough task. Despite
the best effort and intention, mistakes may occur. Furthermore, some journals are surely
more “predatory” than others. Some are truly fraudulent, while many others may be
on the margin. But we have to work with a binary classification only, in which a journal
is labelled either predatory or not. Beall does not provide explanation of his decisions
in a systematic manner, except of occasional notes on his blog, despite the fact that
elaborated criteria exist. Beall's lists are also not exhaustive, because new fraudulent
journals come into existence literally every day.5

A caution is especially warranted when working with Beall's list of publishers. Classifying
the entire publishing house as predatory is problematic, as it cannot be ruled out that
alongside with truly fraudulent journals have been blacklisted also those that are fine.
The list includes publishers maintaining broad portfolios of dozens and even hundreds
of journals, so it well might be that some of them strictly speaking do not deserve
the predatory label. It is likely that they will be of poor quality, but this is not a crime
per se. After all, many non-predatory but local journals which publish research
of marginal relevance, have also already found their way into the main citation
databases. One must therefore keep in mind that the list of publishers is a relatively
rough brush.

Nevertheless, respectable publishing houses should have zero tolerance to predatory
practices. Just as in the banking sector, academic publishing services are based on trust,
and if that is lost the business is doomed. A single journal with predatory inclinations
that are not quickly corrected by the publisher can substantially damage the entire label.
Beall's predatory mark implies at the very least doubts about the publisher's internal
quality assurance mechanisms. It is thus safe to assume, for instance, that a fake peer
review process is prevalent in the whole portfolio of predatory publisher's journals, that
there is not just one rotten egg.

Another concern arises from the timescale. The predatory status is derived from
the content of Beall's lists on 1st April 2016. Jeffrey Beall continuously updates his lists
adding new entries and sometimes (albeit not very frequently) removing no longer
relevant ones. But the lists always reflect only the current status, with no indication

5 Just during April and May 2016 nearly 200 new entries were added to the list of standalone journals.

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