Page 31 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

“Critics spoke out against Beall’s blacklisting of Frontiers, maintaining that
the open-access publisher is legitimate and reputable and does offer proper peer
review.” and criticized the subjectivity of his list (Bloudoff-Indelicato 2015).
The accusations that these journals are predatory therefore need to be taken with
a pinch of salt.

Arguably, this is symptomatic of the previously mentioned limitation of Beall's list
of publishers, in that some journals may unfairly be implicated as predatory,
if the whole publishing house is added to the list. No matter how unlikely, it cannot
be ruled out that individual journals may, thanks to the work of a sensible editor, not
be fraudulent, if even if operating in an adverse context; there could be exceptions
that prove the rule. Journals need to be evaluated with regards to the predatory
practices one by one. Moreover, the fact that mistakes happen does not make the
journal predatory in the true sense. Pointing fingers at a particular journal that does
not rectify the problem promptly is fair, but implicating the entire fleet of journals
under the same publisher is problematic. Unfortunately, many journals that are
otherwise fine suffer from bad peer review and even plagiarism from time to time
(Martin 2013). How many traditional journals that do not subscribe to the open-
access model would need to be strictly speaking labelled predatory if they were
judged according to the same criteria?

The International Journal of Electrochemical Science appears to be
on the borderline between a second-rate journal and a truly predatory one. It is
the most popular indexed journal on Beall's lists in the Czech Republic. It is indexed
not only in Scopus, but also Web of Science, and has been so for some time. Most
of its contributors come from China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other developing
countries. Czech authors are the ninth most frequent. Komm (2016) cites Jeffrey
Beall, according to which it has an unusually high rate of articles withdrawn due to
earlier publication elsewhere, and is run by the same editor as numerous other
suspect journals. Nevertheless, Komm (2016) also notes that reportedly the journal
“is of low quality, but does meet the criteria of predatory journals”. Münich (2016)
is suspicious of this journal, pointing to the fact that the identity of its publisher is
unclear, though, in a discussion on this blog a Czech member of its editorial board
claims that it is not predatory.

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