Librarian removes controversial list of "predatory" journals and publishers

> we need academic administrators on a separate career track to police the bloody lot.

No, we don't. Predatory journals are neither run by nor wanted by the academic community. They are a product of exactly such administrators looking at useless stats such as # of papers published in a "journal".

We don't need better trained bureaucrats that will ultimately still just look at "n papers published" or "x citations" or any other mindlessly calculated statistic.

The administrators you mention do not sound like peers (as in peer-review), but more like they are no longer involved in research and just do administrative tasks. If that is the case, then maybe they are simply the wrong people for the job.

Very few people can accurately assess the quality/impact of research, and most of these are the peers themselves, i.e. the researchers/academics currently active in the area. Lists like the one discussed are a helpful tool to do that assessment quicker, as some publications can be immediately flagged for lacking peer-review. But they do not replace actually understanding the research.

Some background:

1) Traditional Journals: author submits papers for free. Libraries pay to subscribe to journals. Articles are available online only for (very high) fees. The author typically has to sign over the copyright to the publishers, so now the publisher owns the final article, which often was entirely publicly funded (research, writing, peer review), yet there is no open access.

There are thousands of journals, but a few big publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor Francis) own most, and you might have come across their paywalls.

They make obscene profits - their inputs are basically free (articles, peer review), and they charge the libraries extortionate amounts, often through bundling (you want the prestigious journal you must have? well, you got to subscribe to all the other crap we publish, too), literally dollars per page.

2) Resistance. Scientists/librarians etc. noticed and objected. However, it is not easy to change:

Scientists need to publish, and they need to publish in high prestige/impact journals, and the prestige/impact is tied to the title, and the publishers own the titles. (The margins of academic publishers are abnormally high, indicating some sort of market failure.)

Nevertheless, an alternative emerged:

3) Open Access journals. They follow a different model - author retains copyright, and the journal allows open access to the finished article (by putting it on the web, say). As they don’t/can’t make money from subscriptions, they normally charge the author for publication.

So, this is a much better model in terms of, well, open access. Good thing. And, in fact, many grant giving entities (government bodies, Gates foundation, etc.) now stipulate that the research they sponsor has to be published with open access (and they often then cover publication fees).

However, now:

4) Predators: Where previously the journal had an incentive to make the bar for acceptance high (because they needed to sell the result), now, if you get the author to pay and don’t care about sales, you have an incentive to make the bar low.

Thus, predatory OA journals emerged that would basically take the author’s money, say, “yes, nice article, accepted”, and put it on some shoddy website. The author would put it on their publication list - which they now can blow up for a few hundred or thousand dollars.

"Beall's List" just listed these predatory journals of questionable quality that would just take your money and give you a "publication" to put on your CV. It was well know among librarians and scientists that cared, and apparently now it's gone.

(As a sidenote, there also seem to be conferences that are expensive and accept anything, typically in nice locations. So, you basically submit a talk/paper/poster, get a few days vacation, ideally get a travel grant, and then put it on your CV, too.)

What, exactly, are the quotidian things that the government and administrators are interested in? My point is that academics are already absurdly political, both internally (the fight for tenure and academic domain) and external (budgets and priorities). The people who run academia are already basically professional administrators, once you've set on an administrative path, research is very hard to undertake. Why continue with the charade? In my experience, most administrators just want to do their job. I think it's easy to underestimate the number of workaday government administrators that run water treatment plants, streetlights, engineers, etc, that just want to do their job efficiently.

> Cabell’s, which offers services that help librarians, researchers and others discover scholarly journals, has since 2015 worked with Beall on developing a journal blacklist. That list is slated to launch this spring.