Dear Ken,
Thank you for your response. Sorry for my delay in replying.
Underpinning what I wrote was an assumption that the true measure of academia and PhDs is whether they fulfil their wider role in contributing to and improving individuals, society and the world in which we live. That is, the most important thing about PhDs, university research and academia is the public good it creates outside universities.
Responding to your heads up that Beall's list had disappeared, it seemed obvious that commenting on the demise of Beall's list from the perspective of life within the academic bubble doesn't offer much of a contribution to knowledge. What could I say? About the limits is 'Oh, dear, Beall's list is gone, What a tragedy, I found it so useful.' - that kind of comment is bleating merde at its academic best.
Of much more interest and offering better potential contribution was to look at the big picture: the whole world with all its problems, complexity and richness in which the tiny doll's house of academia is located, and within that the existence (or not) of Beall's list.
Then, it becomes interesting and possibly useful to explore counter-intuitive understandings of Beall's creation of the predatory publishing list, its implications and the otherwise hidden insights and evidence the situation potentially offers. These include insights and evidence about PhD supervision, research, academic competencies and practices, and the relation between the academic industry and the world in general .
My comments on problems implied by academic uncritical assumption that Beall's list must be a good thing come from seeing the world as central and academic life as peripheral rather than limiting the understanding to that given by academic interests alone.
One question to ask was, why do we need such a list of publications as Beal produced, and more importantly, from what perspectives do the reasons for such a need arise? Taking this broader perspective, focusing on the benefits to the world and the academic competencies to contribute benefit to the world opens up completely new ways of analysing the roles of Beall's lists.
I suggest many of the implications of such an exploration are potentially damning for the conventional picture of academics and academic life. One explanation as I perhaps too bluntly posed in my previous emails is the need for such a list is driven by lack of competence of academics in being able to themselves individually analyse papers and articles to identify their validity. A second explanation is along the path that academics are short of time (or lazy) so there gathering of knowledge benefits from some filtering by others. A third explanation is that academic research life is primarily a status and privilege game in which status of journal (or simply publishing at all) are central, and the ability to analyse the validity of truth claims and the competence to make or test them are less important. Another explanation comes from viewing academic formation and publishing from the perspective of universities being key parts of a commercial education industrial complex (similar to military industrial complex, medical industrial complex or agricultural industrial complex). From the latter perspective, the primary role of academics is to undertake whatever they are prescribed to do by their managers in order to achieve the aims of those controlling the educational industry complex for profit or power. That is, the essence of what academics do or are competent in has little to do with being competent in analysing the validity of the writing of others.
Looking at the implications of the need for Beall's list and other evidence in contemporary academic practice and descriptions of it, it's quite hard to argue that it is of the essence that academics have or should have the ability to be able to tell truth from bulldust. If you doubt me - try it. I look forward to your thoughts.
On a different tack, you were strongly critical of my comment that,
' 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.'
In my search through publications by Jeffrey Beall, I have not found any place where Beall claims that the primary reasons for his lists were to directly improve the world, to improve academic thinking and research practice, or improve how individuals in the world beneficially distribute and use knowledge (or any of them individually).
Rather, the focus in Beall's comments (and seen perhaps most obviously in his essay ' The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access' (2013) ) have been on other things:
Objections to open access: E.g. 'While the open-access (OA) movement purports to be about making scholarly content open-access, its true motives are much different. The OA movement is an anti-corporatist movement
that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with. '
' The open-access movement is really about anti-corporatism. OA advocates want to make collective everything and eliminate private business, except for small businesses owned by the disadvantaged. They don't like the idea of profit, ...'
(http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/525/514)
Beall takes a position that is *for* capitalist corporation-based commercial publishing and *against* open access in general (see above, ibid)
Claims that the Open Access Movement deliberately fosters predatory publishers: ' The open-access movement has fostered the creation of numerous predatory publishers and standalone journals', ' The emergence of numerous predatory publishers – a product of the open-access movement – has poisoned scholarly communication, fostering research misconduct'. Ibid
Blames high income US academics for what he sees as the Open Access problem: ' Salaries of academics in the United States have increased dramatically in the past two decades, especially among top professors and university administrators. OA advocates don't have a problem with this, and from their high-salaried comfortable positions they demand that for-profit, scholarly journal publishers not be involved in scholarly publishing and devise ways (such as green open-access) to defeat and eliminate them.' Ibid.
Takes a primarily for profit right wing political stance that biases his analysis: ' ...the real goal of the open access movement is to kill off the for-profit publishers and make scholarly publishing a cooperative and socialistic enterprise. It's a negative movement.' (Ibid)
There is also some not so obvious reasoning and false claims...
' Some refer to the Semantic Web as Web 3.0. However, despite intense promotion, it has never taken off. In fact, it is moribund. The advocates who promoted it spent a lot of time and blog space cheerleading for it, and they spent a lot of time trashing technologies and standards it was supposed to replace. In fact, that was what they did the most, badmouthing existing technologies and those who supported and used them.
One example was a library standard called the MARC format. This standard was ridiculed so much it's a wonder it still even exists, yet is still being used successfully by libraries worldwide, and the semantic web is dying a slow death. Open access publishing is the "Semantic Web" of scholarly communication.'
Note: the Semantic Web is now well established (think Siri, Google, Wolfram Alpha, Facebook, Baidu....) and a key part of many academics' and professionals' lives (though perhaps this was not obvious 4 years ago when seen through a librarians eyes - but there was plenty published about it - computerised content analysis, latent semantic analysis, various tools of natural language processing, n-grams, latent Dirichlet allocation, ). Perhaps there is also some concern that one of the purposes of the semantic web and its formal ontologies, knowledge graphs and self-learning semantic AI is to replace the need for librarians and disintermediate their role. For the moment, libraries are still focusing on locating semantic web input within the library paradigm of knowledge management - rather than working to understand how semantic digital archiving can replace many aspects of the traditional role libraries in access to knowledge. ]
There are many other points in Beall's essay that can usefully be teased out to give a counter-intuitive i and very different picture on the reasons for Beall's list than the over-simplistic one that has most commonly appeared in the recent comments about the demise of Beall's list.
You are right - I cannot know Jeffery Beall's motives as formed in in his head. I suggest however there is enough in Beall's essay ((http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/525/514) that, via conceptual and discourse analysis, gives pretty strong evidence to support my earlier suggestion that '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.'
Finally, you suggested I don't have a right to an opinion on this issue (Beall's list). From a public good perspective, you could argue that it is only those outside academia, research and supervising PhDs, that can offer an unbiased opinion. The view of academics on the issue may be biased by self-interest and an over-simplistic understanding due to the focus of their role.
Regards,
Terry
==
Dr Terence Love
Director
Design Out Crime & CPTED Centre
Perth, Western Australia
[log in to unmask]
www.designoutcrime.org
+61 (0)4 3497 5848
==
ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Friedman [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, 18 January 2017 9:25 PM
To: Terence Love <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: PhD-Design <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Beall’s list of predatory publishers is gone
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
--
> 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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