why beall’s list died — and what it left unresolved about...

Why Beall’s List Died — and What It Left Unresolved About Open Acce... http://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Beall-s-List-Died-/241171?cid=a...

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THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

PUBLISHING

Why Heall's List Died- and What It Left Unresolved About Open Access By Paul Baslcen I SEPTEMBER 12, 2011 "'PREMIUM

Theo Stroomer for The Chronicle

Jeffrey Beall. an academic librarian at the u. of Colorado

at Denver, abruptly shuttered a blacklist of journals he

deemed untrustworthy nine months ago. But while the

project has ended, debates over its merit and impact live

on.

There are several prime suspects:

N ine months after a dogged

academic librarian quietly

deleted his carefully tended

list shaming more than a

thousand scientific journals as

unscrupulous, the Beall's list Murder

Mystery remains unsolved.

Why, after toiling so hard for five years

- and creating a resource cherished by

scientists wary of exploitative

publishers - did the University of

Colorado at Denver's Jeffrey Beall

abruptly give it all up? Who, or what,

forced his hand?

• His fellow university librarians, whom Mr. Beall faults for overpromoting open

access publishing models.

• A well-financed Swiss publisher, angry that Mr. Beall had had the temerity to put its

journals on his list.

• His own university, perhaps fatigued by complaints from the publisher, the

librarians, or others.

• The broader academic community-universities, funders of research, publishers,


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and fellow researchers, many of whom long understood the value of Mr. Heall's list

but did little to help him out.

• Mr. Beall himself, who failed to recognize that a bit of online shaming wouldn't stop

many scientists from making common cause with journals that just don't ask too

many questions.

In the end, all played important roles in the demise ofBeall's List. On one level, Mr.

Heall's saga is just another tale of warring personalities. On another, though, it points to

a broader problem in publishing: Universities still have a long way to go to create

systems for researchers to share and collaborate with one another, evaluate one

another's work, and get credit for what really matters in research.

p ublicly, Mr. Beall has put most of the blame on his own university. As his

professional home, that's where he felt the longest and most direct pressure.

Despite being a tenured associate professor of library science, Mr. Beall has

spent the past two years working out of a small cubicle similar to a student's

study carrel, in daily fear, he says, of a new supervisor's threats to make his conditions

much worse.

The university, for its part, has said it values Mr. Heall's work on his list, has spent many

years defending it, and provides him a work space similar to that of other librarians.

"There have been no documented cases of internal threats against him that leadership

or university counsel is aware of," says Emily Williams, a university spokeswoman.

"They're trying to make me as uncomfortable as possible."

Mr. Beall insists otherwise. "They're

trying to make me as uncomfortable

as possible," he said in an interview

from an empty room down the hall,

where he escapes for private

conversations.

But the Swiss publisher angry that it had showed up on his blacklist, Frontiers Media,

may have played an even bigger role. In October 2015, Mr. Beall announced in a tweet


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that he had added Frontiers to his list, citing "wide disapproval from scientists."

In explaining that decision, Mr. Beall cited a series of charges against Frontiers.

Researchers complained oflow-quality peer reviews at Frontiers journals. Reports

described Frontiers as operating a factory oflow-paid workers who churned out

solicitations to academic authors. And the journals had published papers of disputed

accuracy on topics that include creationism, climate change, and AIDS.

Kenneth W. Witwer, an assistant professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology

at the Johns Hopkins University, is an ally of Mr. Heall's. He is also an expert on AIDS,

and he said he was especially bothered by a paper in Frontiers in Public Health

questioning the long-established fact that HIV causes AIDS, and the journal's

subsequent decision not to retract it.

HIV is "the most-studied virus in the history of science," Mr. Witwer said. It may be

understandable that some people don't want to admit its lethal nature, but such

denialism "has been very damaging to the public health, especially in South Africa," he

said.

Yet other researchers defended Frontiers, making clear that while some of Mr. Heall's

additions to his predatory-journals list were relatively open-and-shut cases, Frontiers

was much less clear-cut.

And, more important, much less willing to take Mr. Heall's assessment lying down.

Frederick Fenter, executive editor in charge of open-access journals at Frontiers, quickly

issued a statement decrying Mr. Heall's "dubious actions" and defending its reputation.

When that didn't win a reversal, Mr. Fenter traveled from Lausanne, Switzerland, to

Denver in December 2015 to personally urge University of Colorado leaders to punish

Mr. Beall. He accused the university of being "directly implicated in this absurd and

slanderous action," and demanded an investigation of Mr. Beall.

The following month, the university accepted Frontiers' demand and opened a research

misconduct case against the librarian. Mr. Beall responded almost immediately by

killing his list.


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The university took seven months to complete its review, which posed for Mr. Beall the

threat of dismissal, even with his tenured status. After years of pushing back dozens of

complaints, the university finally agreed to accept the Frontiers plea for a formal

investigation into research misconduct on the grounds that Mr. Beall's scholarship was

"unethical and flawed," said Ms. Williams, the university spokeswoman. "The Frontiers

complaint was unique in its composition, length, detail, and complexity," she said.

Ms. Williams said she could not comment on details of the investigative process, beyond

confirming it ended in recent weeks with "no findings" or action taken against the

professor. The experience nevertheless had its effect, leaving Mr. Beall unwilling to

resume his list. Mr. Fenter had no comment on behalf of Frontiers.

The university initially served as a much more welcoming home for the project, which

Mr. Beall began in 2012 after years of enduring the "spam" solicitations sent to

researchers by the fast-expanding number of open-access publishers using an author

pays model. He chose the term "predatory," feeling such journals were victimizing smart

scientists who just didn't have the time to weed through mounds of solicitations to find

quality suitors for their work.

"For a very long time, his university supported him," said Mr. Witwer.

But that tolerant attitude began to turn, Mr. Beall and Mr. Witwer said, as the list grew,

case-by-case decisions became tougher, and better-financed publishers, such as

Frontiers, more directly confronted him and his university.

M eanwhile, as his public recognition grew, Mr. Beall became increasingly

outspoken in assigning blame for the spread of predatory journals -with

his fellow academic librarians the main target. Mr. Beall was convinced

that the push for open-access journals had become more than just a

reform to foster better science. Instead he saw it as a "social movement."

In Mr. Beall's analysis, journal-subscription costs had been driven up by a variety of

economic, academic, and demographic shifts, compounded by the failure of academic


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librarians to properly manage those shifts. Rather than admit that, Mr. Beall concluded,

librarians had joined in unfair denunciations oflarge subscription-model publishers,

such as Elsevier, for reaping unduly large profits.

Those librarians essentially adopted a political perspective, Mr. Beall argued, that led

them to overlook a chief characteristic of open-access journals - a model in which

authors, not subscribers, pay the cost of publishing. That model, according to Mr. Beall,

creates dangerous incentives for corner-cutting and abuse.

"I honestly think he was trying to do the right thing, which I applaud."

Open-access advocates accept that

criticism, to a point. The author-pays

model does have obvious flaws and is

not sustainable in the long term,

acknowledged Heather Joseph,

executive director of the Scholarly

Publishing and Academic Resources

Coalition. But less than 40 percent of open-access journals now use that model, and that

percentage will continue to shrink as universities, research funders, and others

recognize the need to support open-access publishing, she said.

Ms. Joseph said Mr. Beall had provided a valuable service in helping researchers and

publishers confront some of the disreputable actors in their midst. "I honestly think he

was trying to do the right thing, which I applaud," she said of Mr. Beall.

But the traditional publishing community, rather than open-access upstarts, deserves

the primary blame for predatory journals, Ms. Joseph said. That's because subscription

based publishers for years refused to contemplate open-access models, she said, thereby

letting such journals grow in the largely ungoverned and unmonitored environment that

Mr. Beall began to confront- largely on his own - in 2012.

r. Beall also has lost allies by casting researchers and their universities as victims of

rapacious publishers. In fact, open-access advocates suggest, both groups shoulder

some blame. Scientists could be a lot more careful before choosing a journal that makes


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M unsolicited phone or email invitations, they argue, and universities could

do a lot more to teach researchers about the risks.

"If you are a reputable researcher or a competent researcher, you know

that thaf s not how you get published," Ms. Joseph said, referring to email solicitations.

"Good journals are not going to come to you and beg you for your articles. That should

be your first clue."

In one of the many examples of predation cited by Mr. Beall, a Chilean researcher

complained to him that the J oumal of Bioremediation and Bio de gradation - owned by

OMICS International, a company on Mr. Beall's blacklist - had quickly published his

team's manuscript, including key errors, after no review interaction. (OMICS later

threatened to sue Mr. Beall for $1 billion.)

Yet the researcher also admitted, in a message to Mr. Beall, that his team had decided to

"rush into publishing our current work" after receiving a solicitation from the journal.

The team, he said, had felt it needed to publish to win more research funding - and so it

moved so fast that its original version contained mistakes.

For some, that scenario raised an

uncomfortable question: When a scientist

elects to use a "predatory" publisher, who,

if anyone, is the real predator? It may be

cynical to admit, said Brian A. Nosek, co

founder and director of the Center for

Open Science, but if researchers choose a

low-quality journal "and receive the

rewards that they desire from publishing,

then nothing predatory occurred. 11

When a scientist elects to use a 'predatory' publisher, who, if anyone, is the real predator?

A researcher's claim to victimhood could be stronger, for instance, if he or she had

genuine reason to expect a quality peer-review process but did not receive one, Mr.

Nosek said. A predatory act also could occur, he said, if researchers unexpectedly found

that their universities "actually care about quality and integrity of peer review, 11 and deny


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career rewards to those published in poor journals.

Just last week, a research team at the University of Ottawa laid out evidence suggesting

that while many low-quality journals are based in developing nations, it's often

scientists in wealthier nations who agree to publish in them. It's hard to tell how many of

those scientists are being genuinely misled, said one of the study's authors, Kelly D.

Cobey, an adjunct professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of

Ottawa.

Even then, said a co-author, Larissa Shamseer, a doctoral student at Ottawa, some

journals could have strong editorial standards but an amateurish web presence that

mostly reflects a lack of financial resources. Either way, Ms. Cobey said, it seems clear

that universities and funders are not doing enough to educate themselves and their

researchers on the topic.

F or researchers and universities wary of junk journals, Mr. Beall's "blacklist" of

bad actors provided some of that education. But to many of them, such a list

was fundamentally more problematic than a "white list" of quality publishers,

Mr. Nosek said. White lists have the benefit of "clear, explicit criteria" for

inclusion, while blacklists seem "inherently riskier and more litigation friendly," he said.

Mr. Beall discovered the greater risk. His online list of predatory journals described his

general criteria for inclusion. But he said he had kept specific reasons in particular cases

confidential because the details often came from researchers who feared retaliation if

their complaints became publicly known.

He disputes, however, any suggestion that a white list is a better method. Leading

examples of white lists include PubMed, the journal archive operated by the National

Institutes of Health, and the membership lists of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers

Association and the Directory of Open Access Journals, all of which use quality criteria to

limit eligible journals.

PubMed contains either the full text or citation data for some 5,500 journals, chosen


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through an extensive grant-like review process. The number is limited to keep the task of

archiving manageable. Exclusion from it should therefore not be taken as a sign of a low

quality journal, said Jerry Sheehan, deputy director of the National library of Medicine.

The criteria for acceptance by the association and the directory are also subject to

interpretation. The directory essentially requires its members to offer "high-quality"

peer review. The association has a longer set of standards that includes a requirement

that any direct marketing be "appropriate and well-targeted," and a ban on any activities

that could bring open-access publishing "into disrepute." Yet both have accepted

Frontiers and the Dove Medical Press, two publishers widely criticized for their editorial

practices.

Claire Redhead, executive director of the association, said it had investigated complaints

about Frontiers and Dove, and found that both meet its membership criteria.

A private company, Cabell's International, has maintained its own series of journal white

lists - available by subscription only- since 1978. In June it began offering a blacklist,

largely to fill the void left by Mr. Beall, said Kathleen Berryman, a project manager at

Cabell's.

Cabell's hoped to offer its blacklist free to the academic community, Ms. Berryman said.

But it found it could not afford to match what Mr. Beall had done largely on his own

time, often by rising at 4 a.m. daily to begin his work, she said. As for Frontiers, Cabell' s

investigated and found it eligible for neither its blacklist nor its white list, Ms. Berryman

said.

For now, the leading blacklist remains Mr. Beall's, even after he took it offline. A scholar

who is willing to be identified only as a postdoctoral researcher at a European university

has resurrected the list at a new, publicly available site. But the successor, who said he

had hidden his identity because he fears the type of threats Mr. Beall encountered, noted

by email that he and others probably will not have much time to maintain such an

undertaking. "Probably the Beall's Llst will lose its relevancy over time because of that,"

he said.

It's one of many ways that finances loom as a major impediment to quality in open-


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access publishing. Open-access journals that do not use author fees or university

subsidies typically depend on the benevolence of field-specific professional

associations. "Often they operate on very tight budgets and rely excessively on

volunteerism," Mr. Beall said. "So they often do well for a while and then don't do well."

Mr. Heall's list was, among other things, an attempt to ferret out journals that had failed

to take peer review seriously. Beyond the list, however, is a more-fundamental question:

What exactly should peer review do for science in the internet era, and how often is it

really needed?

As soon as possible, said Ms. Joseph, of the scholarly-publishing coalition, open access

in scholarly communications should be extended to refer not just to freely available

journal articles or even scientific data but to "the entire range of communications." In

that future, she said, researchers would earn professional credit for all types of scientific

contributions and collaborations, not just final articles.

Science is slowly moving in that direction, with the proliferation of online "pre

publication" websites on which research findings are presented without any pretense of

wider peer review.

Peer-reviewed publications are not 'inherently bad things. But they're the single currency right now' that denotes progress or quality in science and largely determines career advancement.

Some research teams might find value

in eventually seeking affirmation of

their work through publishing in

journals with peer review, Ms. Joseph

said. Peer-reviewed publications are

not "inherently bad things," she said.

"But they're the single currency right

now" that denotes progress or quality

in science and largely determines

career advancement, she said. "That's

too heavy-handed at this point."

For Mr. Beall, after five years of battle

scars, career advancement is now


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more a personal concern than a systematic one.

Having raised his hand at a time the research community seemed to need him, he now

puzzles over many aspects of his treatment. Universities might want innovators, he said,

but perhaps more important they like happy news. "They prefer things like 'Students go

to Haiti and dig a well to help poor people' - they love stuff like that," he said. "But they

don't like 'Faculty member calls out predatory publishers.'"

Some critics weren't sad to see Beall's List go: It lacked scientific rigor, they said. But

others admitted that there's no real way to clearly define a predatory journal, and they

gave the librarian credit for trying. It's a subjective assessment, Mr. Beall said, and

anyone trying to keep score just has to make the best case.

"That's what I did," he said. "I made the decisions."

Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He

can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at [email protected].

Copyright© 2017 The Chronicle of Higher Education

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