'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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Academic Research and Publishing - Improvements and Transitions Keep on Coming

If ONLY the choices and ease of academic research existing today were available when I was knee-deep in graduate studies! Tonight's post is loaded with informative links (for those interested in learning more about academic research and publishing). 

Today, for example, integrated digitised modules allow academics and librarians to locate, bookmark, publish, manage and observe/analyze by tracking the usage of learning resources for students - These modules also enable the learning resources (content) to be stored while simultaneously ensuring authenticated student access and providing copyright compliance.

Before I forget and for those who are not too familiar with (or simply forgot) here is a definition of academic publishing (for academic pros the last paragraph discusses transition to electronic format and two types of open access):

'Academic publishing describes the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in journal article, book or thesis form. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.

Most established academic disciplines have their own journals and other outlets for publication, although many academic journals are somewhat interdisciplinary, and publish work from several distinct fields or subfields. There is also a tendency for existing journals to divide into specialized sections as the field itself becomes more specialized. Along with the variation in review and publication procedures, the kinds of publications that are accepted as contributions to knowledge or research differ greatly among fields and subfields.

Academic publishing is undergoing major changes, as it makes the transition from the print to the electronic format. Business models are different in the electronic environment. Since the early 1990s, licensing of electronic resources, particularly journals, has been very common. Currently, an important trend, particularly with respect to scholarly journals, is open access via the Internet. There are two main forms of open access: open access publishing, in which a whole journal (or book) or individual articles are made available free for all on the web by the publisher at the time of publication (sometimes, but not always, for an extra publication fee paid by the author or the author's institution or funder); and open access self-archiving, in which authors themselves make a copy of their published articles available free for all on the web.' --- Wikipedia

This little ditty from Knowledge Speak.com, the daily resource for the STM publishing industry: 

EBSCO and Talis partner to integrate EDS into Talis Aspire reading list and copyright compliance solutions

Library resources provider EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) (EBSCO stands for Elton B. Stephens Co.) recently announced a partnership with Talis. As a result of this partnership, more libraries will have the ability to optimise their individual discovery experience. The partnership enables EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) to be seamlessly integrated into Talis's cloud based Talis Aspire Reading List and Talis Aspire Digitised Content modules.

EBSCO works continuously to expand the number of library technology platform/ILS partnerships in order to give libraries more choices for greater integration of their library resources. EDS provides a full-featured experience for end users bringing together a comprehensive index and a single search approach while also offering a true academic and powerful environment in order to facilitate a comprehensive discovery experience. 

Talis is a UK based business whose mission is to apply software and data to help transform education. The Talis Aspire Reading List module enables academics and librarians to find, bookmark, manage, publish and track usage of recommended learning resources for students. The Talis Aspire Digitised Content module enables digitised content referenced on reading lists to be managed and stored, whilst ensuring authenticated access to students and providing regular copyright compliance reporting. 

The data in the Talis Platform consists of over 100,000 reading lists containing over 2 million references to learning resources including textbooks, ebooks, journals, documents, videos and web pages. These are teaching resources recommended by academics from over 50 universities, and used by over 1 million students at campuses around the world. 

Go here for original article

My past posts (10) on Academic Publishing