Dear Terry,
It’s difficult for me to respond to a post such as this without writing a great deal more than I’ve got the time to write. In an ideal, pseudo-libertarian world, your positive ways of looking at the situation might make sense. But, then, you don’t publish your work in journals, you don’t work at a university — at least not in doctoral education, and you are no longer responsible for mentoring doctoral students or junior researchers. If you had these kinds of responsibilities, you’d find the list useful, and you would not speak of it in such condescending terms as a “protective nanny-guide.”
We should indeed help doctoral students and younger researchers to identify predatory journals. This is sometimes difficult, with the massive flood of these ventures that predatory publishers launch on a daily basis. In my view, some of your reasons make no sense in the real world. People simply cannot manage the massive flow of information. If you were to work with these issues, you’d know this. The very flood of publications — even real ones — is has long been responsible for a high degree of information overload in nearly every field. As I see it, it makes little sense to talk about reducing barriers to communication and speeding dissemination when the massive load of research communications is so great that the quantity of serious research publishing is itself the greatest barrier to communication and rapid dissemination. On January 4, I replied to Stanislav Roudavski and Fil Salustri on the topic of a design research equivalent to ArXiv. In reply, you’ll find a list of over 40 serious, non-predatory design journals (copied below). People can hardly keep up with these.
When you add the fact that many people in our field work in parallel fields where we must also keep up with the ever-expanding literature, adding rubbish to the real literature and suggesting that people read that rubbish to evaluate it each for ourselves makes no sense.
To this, of course, you may also add the fact that many of these predatory journals are, in fact, criminal enterprises. Routine gambits of the predatory publishing industry include: falsely using the names of real scholars on their editorial boards, refusing to remove names when the real scholars ask to be removed, adding fake research results to every field in a way that exacerbates the already difficult problem of analyzing and evaluating serious research findings.
While Beall does not suggest this, anyone aware of Jan Lapidus’s “Stockholm noir” novels will also recognize that the publishing fees paid to countries where most of these publishers house their business are a terrific way to launder money. This has nothing to do with why scholars might pay such fees, but it does suggest good ways to turn the proceeds of criminal activity into legitimate publishing income, especially in places where these firms pay no tax on their foreign income. But the quasi-criminal enterprise of defrauding inexperienced scholars is already so large that perhaps there is no need for these publishers to launder funds from drugs or human trafficking. Come to think of it, tricking recent PhD grads into paying fees to fake journals is a form of human trafficking.
You end with a statement that is false, and you have no right to make it. You write, “the reason for Beall's list was NOT directly to improve the world, to improve academic thinking and research practice or improve how individuals in the world beneficially distribute and use knowledge.” Whether or not you may with Beall’s opinions, you have no basis for judging his motives or the reason behind the list. You don’t know Jeffrey Beall. I have never met him, but I have from time to time exchanged letters. In my view, his reasons were exactly those you deny: improving the world, improving academic thinking and research practice, and improving how individuals in the world beneficially distribute and use knowledge.
Because nearly all predatory journals are open access, these journals would reduce the strain on library budgets if they were useful in any way. As a budget-conscious librarian, Jeffrey Beall has every reason to value serious, free open access journals such as PLOS One, or — in our field — the International Journal of Design.
As a responsible librarian whose job it is to offer advice and value to his library users, he has a second responsibility: evaluating the quality of journals, free or behind the expensive paywall that many publishers maintain.
In a world with thousands of predatory publishers, Jeffrey Beall provided a great service to the hundreds of thousands of librarians who could not keep up with the flood, and to the many professors whose jobs require us to mentor doctoral students and junior researchers.
You got the right to have opinions on some of these issues, as we all do, but I don’t see why you should as you don’t do this kind of work.
The one issue on which you have no right to an opinion is in making a peremptory and mistaken judgement of Jeffrey Beall’s motives. I see nothing good about the termination of this fine project — but then, I use it nearly every day in answering questions, and I don’t have the time to read every fake journal for myself to see whether it is useful, especially not in fields slightly distant from the work I do. If you had to answer as many questions on these kinds of issues as some of us do, you’d respect Beall to a far greater degree.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
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> On Jan 18, 2017, at 12:53 PM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
—snip—
> There is, however, another, perhaps more positive, way of looking at this situation.
>
> You could see the loss of a protective nanny-guide (accepted that it was skilfully implemented) to predatory publishing as one of a number of factors that apply at least a small pressure on individuals to be competent.
>
> Some of the things that would to me seem to be good consequences are:
>
> That individuals could be competent enough to read a research publication and be able to competently analyse whether the content was valid or not.
>
> For individual's to be able to read, analyse and judge the validity of a publication without depending on reviewers as proxies for competence to tell them whether it was valid, or professional guidance as to whether it was a 'good' publication or not .
>
> That individuals could be expected to have read, understood and remember all the content of publications in a field rather than the tiny snippets that have been referenced (perhaps misleadingly).
>
> That anyone can publish anything and it is the responsibility for each and all of us to be competent enough to make a personal judgement as to how much to incorporate it into our own thinking.
>
> A removal of control of communication via elite-controlled gatekeeping of publication
>
> Reduced barriers to communication and speed of dissemination about new ideas in new disciplines.
>
> And perhaps not least...
>
> A weakening of the stultifying roles of universities on society, and
>
> A hope that we can all be competent enough to be aware when a person or organisation is making money from things we do without paying us for it, and the strength of character to do something about it...
>
> A final aside, the reason for Beall's list was NOT directly to improve the world, to improve academic thinking and research practice, or improve how individuals in the world beneficially distribute and use knowledge. The focus of Beall's list is that of a librarian (see for example - http://crln.acrl.org/content/76/3/132.full) - with all that profession's challenges of managing resources to a budget - and the reality that libraries and the way that librarians act as an intermediary gatekeeping access to information are becoming less relevant - disintermediated.
—snip—
List of design journals:
—snip—
Applied Ergonomics
Creativity and Innovation Management
CoDesign
Computer-Aided Design
Design and Culture
Design Issues
Design Management Journal
Design Philosophy Papers
Design Science
Design Studies
Digital Creativity
Empirical Studies of the Arts
Ergonomics
Ergonomics in Design
Human-Computer Interaction
Human Factors
Information Design Journal
Interacting with Computers
International Journal of Art & Design Education
International Journal of Design
International Journal of Product Development
International Journal of Sustainable Design
International Journal of Technology and Design Education
International Journal on Interactive Design and Manufacturing
Journal of Design History
Journal of Design Research
Journal of Engineering Design
Journal of Interior Design
Journal of Material Culture
Journal of Mechanical Design
Journal of Product Innovation Management
Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces
Materials & Design
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing
Research in Engineering Design
Sciences du Design
She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation
The Design Journal
The Journal of Design, Business & Society
The Journal of Sustainable Product Design
The Senses & Society
Visible Language
Visual Communication
—snip—
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