Why Beall’s List Died — and What It Left Unresolved About...
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THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
PUBLISHING
Why Heall's List Died- and What It Left Unresolved About Open Access By Paul Baslcen I SEPTEMBER 12, 2011 "'PREMIUM
Theo Stroomer for The Chronicle
Jeffrey Beall. an academic librarian at the u. of Colorado
at Denver, abruptly shuttered a blacklist of journals he
deemed untrustworthy nine months ago. But while the
project has ended, debates over its merit and impact live
on.
There are several prime suspects:
N ine months after a dogged
academic librarian quietly
deleted his carefully tended
list shaming more than a
thousand scientific journals as
unscrupulous, the Beall's list Murder
Mystery remains unsolved.
Why, after toiling so hard for five years
- and creating a resource cherished by
scientists wary of exploitative
publishers - did the University of
Colorado at Denver's Jeffrey Beall
abruptly give it all up? Who, or what,
forced his hand?
• His fellow university librarians, whom Mr. Beall faults for overpromoting open
access publishing models.
• A well-financed Swiss publisher, angry that Mr. Beall had had the temerity to put its
journals on his list.
• His own university, perhaps fatigued by complaints from the publisher, the
librarians, or others.
• The broader academic community-universities, funders of research, publishers,
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and fellow researchers, many of whom long understood the value of Mr. Heall's list
but did little to help him out.
• Mr. Beall himself, who failed to recognize that a bit of online shaming wouldn't stop
many scientists from making common cause with journals that just don't ask too
many questions.
In the end, all played important roles in the demise ofBeall's List. On one level, Mr.
Heall's saga is just another tale of warring personalities. On another, though, it points to
a broader problem in publishing: Universities still have a long way to go to create
systems for researchers to share and collaborate with one another, evaluate one
another's work, and get credit for what really matters in research.
p ublicly, Mr. Beall has put most of the blame on his own university. As his
professional home, that's where he felt the longest and most direct pressure.
Despite being a tenured associate professor of library science, Mr. Beall has
spent the past two years working out of a small cubicle similar to a student's
study carrel, in daily fear, he says, of a new supervisor's threats to make his conditions
much worse.
The university, for its part, has said it values Mr. Heall's work on his list, has spent many
years defending it, and provides him a work space similar to that of other librarians.
"There have been no documented cases of internal threats against him that leadership
or university counsel is aware of," says Emily Williams, a university spokeswoman.
"They're trying to make me as uncomfortable as possible."
Mr. Beall insists otherwise. "They're
trying to make me as uncomfortable
as possible," he said in an interview
from an empty room down the hall,
where he escapes for private
conversations.
But the Swiss publisher angry that it had showed up on his blacklist, Frontiers Media,
may have played an even bigger role. In October 2015, Mr. Beall announced in a tweet
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that he had added Frontiers to his list, citing "wide disapproval from scientists."
In explaining that decision, Mr. Beall cited a series of charges against Frontiers.
Researchers complained oflow-quality peer reviews at Frontiers journals. Reports
described Frontiers as operating a factory oflow-paid workers who churned out
solicitations to academic authors. And the journals had published papers of disputed
accuracy on topics that include creationism, climate change, and AIDS.
Kenneth W. Witwer, an assistant professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology
at the Johns Hopkins University, is an ally of Mr. Heall's. He is also an expert on AIDS,
and he said he was especially bothered by a paper in Frontiers in Public Health
questioning the long-established fact that HIV causes AIDS, and the journal's
subsequent decision not to retract it.
HIV is "the most-studied virus in the history of science," Mr. Witwer said. It may be
understandable that some people don't want to admit its lethal nature, but such
denialism "has been very damaging to the public health, especially in South Africa," he
said.
Yet other researchers defended Frontiers, making clear that while some of Mr. Heall's
additions to his predatory-journals list were relatively open-and-shut cases, Frontiers
was much less clear-cut.
And, more important, much less willing to take Mr. Heall's assessment lying down.
Frederick Fenter, executive editor in charge of open-access journals at Frontiers, quickly
issued a statement decrying Mr. Heall's "dubious actions" and defending its reputation.
When that didn't win a reversal, Mr. Fenter traveled from Lausanne, Switzerland, to
Denver in December 2015 to personally urge University of Colorado leaders to punish
Mr. Beall. He accused the university of being "directly implicated in this absurd and
slanderous action," and demanded an investigation of Mr. Beall.
The following month, the university accepted Frontiers' demand and opened a research
misconduct case against the librarian. Mr. Beall responded almost immediately by
killing his list.
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The university took seven months to complete its review, which posed for Mr. Beall the
threat of dismissal, even with his tenured status. After years of pushing back dozens of
complaints, the university finally agreed to accept the Frontiers plea for a formal
investigation into research misconduct on the grounds that Mr. Beall's scholarship was
"unethical and flawed," said Ms. Williams, the university spokeswoman. "The Frontiers
complaint was unique in its composition, length, detail, and complexity," she said.
Ms. Williams said she could not comment on details of the investigative process, beyond
confirming it ended in recent weeks with "no findings" or action taken against the
professor. The experience nevertheless had its effect, leaving Mr. Beall unwilling to
resume his list. Mr. Fenter had no comment on behalf of Frontiers.
The university initially served as a much more welcoming home for the project, which
Mr. Beall began in 2012 after years of enduring the "spam" solicitations sent to
researchers by the fast-expanding number of open-access publishers using an author
pays model. He chose the term "predatory," feeling such journals were victimizing smart
scientists who just didn't have the time to weed through mounds of solicitations to find
quality suitors for their work.
"For a very long time, his university supported him," said Mr. Witwer.
But that tolerant attitude began to turn, Mr. Beall and Mr. Witwer said, as the list grew,
case-by-case decisions became tougher, and better-financed publishers, such as
Frontiers, more directly confronted him and his university.
M eanwhile, as his public recognition grew, Mr. Beall became increasingly
outspoken in assigning blame for the spread of predatory journals -with
his fellow academic librarians the main target. Mr. Beall was convinced
that the push for open-access journals had become more than just a
reform to foster better science. Instead he saw it as a "social movement."
In Mr. Beall's analysis, journal-subscription costs had been driven up by a variety of
economic, academic, and demographic shifts, compounded by the failure of academic
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librarians to properly manage those shifts. Rather than admit that, Mr. Beall concluded,
librarians had joined in unfair denunciations oflarge subscription-model publishers,
such as Elsevier, for reaping unduly large profits.
Those librarians essentially adopted a political perspective, Mr. Beall argued, that led
them to overlook a chief characteristic of open-access journals - a model in which
authors, not subscribers, pay the cost of publishing. That model, according to Mr. Beall,
creates dangerous incentives for corner-cutting and abuse.
"I honestly think he was trying to do the right thing, which I applaud."
Open-access advocates accept that
criticism, to a point. The author-pays
model does have obvious flaws and is
not sustainable in the long term,
acknowledged Heather Joseph,
executive director of the Scholarly
Publishing and Academic Resources
Coalition. But less than 40 percent of open-access journals now use that model, and that
percentage will continue to shrink as universities, research funders, and others
recognize the need to support open-access publishing, she said.
Ms. Joseph said Mr. Beall had provided a valuable service in helping researchers and
publishers confront some of the disreputable actors in their midst. "I honestly think he
was trying to do the right thing, which I applaud," she said of Mr. Beall.
But the traditional publishing community, rather than open-access upstarts, deserves
the primary blame for predatory journals, Ms. Joseph said. That's because subscription
based publishers for years refused to contemplate open-access models, she said, thereby
letting such journals grow in the largely ungoverned and unmonitored environment that
Mr. Beall began to confront- largely on his own - in 2012.
r. Beall also has lost allies by casting researchers and their universities as victims of
rapacious publishers. In fact, open-access advocates suggest, both groups shoulder
some blame. Scientists could be a lot more careful before choosing a journal that makes
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M unsolicited phone or email invitations, they argue, and universities could
do a lot more to teach researchers about the risks.
"If you are a reputable researcher or a competent researcher, you know
that thaf s not how you get published," Ms. Joseph said, referring to email solicitations.
"Good journals are not going to come to you and beg you for your articles. That should
be your first clue."
In one of the many examples of predation cited by Mr. Beall, a Chilean researcher
complained to him that the J oumal of Bioremediation and Bio de gradation - owned by
OMICS International, a company on Mr. Beall's blacklist - had quickly published his
team's manuscript, including key errors, after no review interaction. (OMICS later
threatened to sue Mr. Beall for $1 billion.)
Yet the researcher also admitted, in a message to Mr. Beall, that his team had decided to
"rush into publishing our current work" after receiving a solicitation from the journal.
The team, he said, had felt it needed to publish to win more research funding - and so it
moved so fast that its original version contained mistakes.
For some, that scenario raised an
uncomfortable question: When a scientist
elects to use a "predatory" publisher, who,
if anyone, is the real predator? It may be
cynical to admit, said Brian A. Nosek, co
founder and director of the Center for
Open Science, but if researchers choose a
low-quality journal "and receive the
rewards that they desire from publishing,
then nothing predatory occurred. 11
When a scientist elects to use a 'predatory' publisher, who, if anyone, is the real predator?
A researcher's claim to victimhood could be stronger, for instance, if he or she had
genuine reason to expect a quality peer-review process but did not receive one, Mr.
Nosek said. A predatory act also could occur, he said, if researchers unexpectedly found
that their universities "actually care about quality and integrity of peer review, 11 and deny
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career rewards to those published in poor journals.
Just last week, a research team at the University of Ottawa laid out evidence suggesting
that while many low-quality journals are based in developing nations, it's often
scientists in wealthier nations who agree to publish in them. It's hard to tell how many of
those scientists are being genuinely misled, said one of the study's authors, Kelly D.
Cobey, an adjunct professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of
Ottawa.
Even then, said a co-author, Larissa Shamseer, a doctoral student at Ottawa, some
journals could have strong editorial standards but an amateurish web presence that
mostly reflects a lack of financial resources. Either way, Ms. Cobey said, it seems clear
that universities and funders are not doing enough to educate themselves and their
researchers on the topic.
F or researchers and universities wary of junk journals, Mr. Beall's "blacklist" of
bad actors provided some of that education. But to many of them, such a list
was fundamentally more problematic than a "white list" of quality publishers,
Mr. Nosek said. White lists have the benefit of "clear, explicit criteria" for
inclusion, while blacklists seem "inherently riskier and more litigation friendly," he said.
Mr. Beall discovered the greater risk. His online list of predatory journals described his
general criteria for inclusion. But he said he had kept specific reasons in particular cases
confidential because the details often came from researchers who feared retaliation if
their complaints became publicly known.
He disputes, however, any suggestion that a white list is a better method. Leading
examples of white lists include PubMed, the journal archive operated by the National
Institutes of Health, and the membership lists of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers
Association and the Directory of Open Access Journals, all of which use quality criteria to
limit eligible journals.
PubMed contains either the full text or citation data for some 5,500 journals, chosen
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through an extensive grant-like review process. The number is limited to keep the task of
archiving manageable. Exclusion from it should therefore not be taken as a sign of a low
quality journal, said Jerry Sheehan, deputy director of the National library of Medicine.
The criteria for acceptance by the association and the directory are also subject to
interpretation. The directory essentially requires its members to offer "high-quality"
peer review. The association has a longer set of standards that includes a requirement
that any direct marketing be "appropriate and well-targeted," and a ban on any activities
that could bring open-access publishing "into disrepute." Yet both have accepted
Frontiers and the Dove Medical Press, two publishers widely criticized for their editorial
practices.
Claire Redhead, executive director of the association, said it had investigated complaints
about Frontiers and Dove, and found that both meet its membership criteria.
A private company, Cabell's International, has maintained its own series of journal white
lists - available by subscription only- since 1978. In June it began offering a blacklist,
largely to fill the void left by Mr. Beall, said Kathleen Berryman, a project manager at
Cabell's.
Cabell's hoped to offer its blacklist free to the academic community, Ms. Berryman said.
But it found it could not afford to match what Mr. Beall had done largely on his own
time, often by rising at 4 a.m. daily to begin his work, she said. As for Frontiers, Cabell' s
investigated and found it eligible for neither its blacklist nor its white list, Ms. Berryman
said.
For now, the leading blacklist remains Mr. Beall's, even after he took it offline. A scholar
who is willing to be identified only as a postdoctoral researcher at a European university
has resurrected the list at a new, publicly available site. But the successor, who said he
had hidden his identity because he fears the type of threats Mr. Beall encountered, noted
by email that he and others probably will not have much time to maintain such an
undertaking. "Probably the Beall's Llst will lose its relevancy over time because of that,"
he said.
It's one of many ways that finances loom as a major impediment to quality in open-
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access publishing. Open-access journals that do not use author fees or university
subsidies typically depend on the benevolence of field-specific professional
associations. "Often they operate on very tight budgets and rely excessively on
volunteerism," Mr. Beall said. "So they often do well for a while and then don't do well."
Mr. Heall's list was, among other things, an attempt to ferret out journals that had failed
to take peer review seriously. Beyond the list, however, is a more-fundamental question:
What exactly should peer review do for science in the internet era, and how often is it
really needed?
As soon as possible, said Ms. Joseph, of the scholarly-publishing coalition, open access
in scholarly communications should be extended to refer not just to freely available
journal articles or even scientific data but to "the entire range of communications." In
that future, she said, researchers would earn professional credit for all types of scientific
contributions and collaborations, not just final articles.
Science is slowly moving in that direction, with the proliferation of online "pre
publication" websites on which research findings are presented without any pretense of
wider peer review.
Peer-reviewed publications are not 'inherently bad things. But they're the single currency right now' that denotes progress or quality in science and largely determines career advancement.
Some research teams might find value
in eventually seeking affirmation of
their work through publishing in
journals with peer review, Ms. Joseph
said. Peer-reviewed publications are
not "inherently bad things," she said.
"But they're the single currency right
now" that denotes progress or quality
in science and largely determines
career advancement, she said. "That's
too heavy-handed at this point."
For Mr. Beall, after five years of battle
scars, career advancement is now
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more a personal concern than a systematic one.
Having raised his hand at a time the research community seemed to need him, he now
puzzles over many aspects of his treatment. Universities might want innovators, he said,
but perhaps more important they like happy news. "They prefer things like 'Students go
to Haiti and dig a well to help poor people' - they love stuff like that," he said. "But they
don't like 'Faculty member calls out predatory publishers.'"
Some critics weren't sad to see Beall's List go: It lacked scientific rigor, they said. But
others admitted that there's no real way to clearly define a predatory journal, and they
gave the librarian credit for trying. It's a subjective assessment, Mr. Beall said, and
anyone trying to keep score just has to make the best case.
"That's what I did," he said. "I made the decisions."
Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He
can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at [email protected].
Copyright© 2017 The Chronicle of Higher Education