'Predatory Scholarly Publishing Practices' are Contaminating the STM Publishing Industry

For those of us who forgot, the STM publishing industry refers to the Scientific, Technical and Medical publishing field; generally encompassed within the academic journal genre.

I have long had an interest in the internal workings of the academic publishing field, due mainly to the enormous money making capabilities of the academic journal publishers and their shabby treatment of the researcher-authors (from whom they make their livelihood). Even to requiring the authors to pay an APC (article processing charge)! 

AND, mind you, the authors of academic research never receive a percentage of compensation based on article usage (for further research) or overall journal profit - even for a specified time. Talk about corralling intellectual knowledge into academic slave labor!

At any rate, tonights research article comes from Knowledge Speak, the daily intelligence resource for the STM Publishing industry and discusses 'a study conducted by researchers from Hanken School of Economics and published in the open access journal BMC Medicine, which sheds new light on the volume and market characteristics of so-called ‘predatory’ scholarly journal publishing.'

Key excerpts:

"The study shows the number of articles published in journals defined as such that have increased nearly eightfold since 2010. However, it concludes that the problem of ‘predatory journals’ is limited to a few countries where researchers are known to be placed under pressure to publish in international journals."

"The success of open access publishing, which has seen enormous growth in the last 15 years, has also seen the unwelcome development of what has become known as ‘predatory’ journals. These are APC-charging journals, which publish articles rapidly without proper peer review."

"In the past few years, there have been investigations or journalistic stings into ‘predatory’ publishing but very few systematic research studies. To address this, an empirical investigation was undertaken, which took as its starting point Beall’s List. Beall’s List is a blacklist of over 600 ‘predatory’ publishers and 400 individual journals compiled by the librarian Jeffery Beall based on a number of criteria that he believes reveal the true nature of such journals, for instance obscuring where the journal is operating from, faked editorial boards, and marketing unrealistically low delays from submission to publishing. The researchers utilized this list as the basis for their study, as it is currently the most widely known list available."

Read the rest of this insightful article: New study reveals characteristics of the ‘predatory’ scholarly publishing market 


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