QUESTIONABLE PUBLISHERS:
THE DOAJ PERSPECTIVE
SPARC WEBINAR
MARCH 1, 2018
TOM@DOAJ.ORG
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF DOAJ

You are free to:
Copy, share, adapt, or re-mix;
Blog, live-blog, or post video of;
This presentation. Provided that:
You attribute the work to its author and respect the rights
and licenses associated with its components.
Slide Concept by Cameron Neylon, who has waived all copyright and related or neighbouring rights. This slide only ccZero.
Social Media Icons adapted with permission from originals by Christopher Ross. Original images are available under GPL at;
http://www.thisismyurl.com/free-downloads/15-free-speech-bubble-icons-for-popular-websites

● What Quality are we talking about?
● Is There A Problem With Quality?
● Is The Problem uniquely for Open Access?
● What Is The Extent of The Problem?
● Open Access journals are no worse than
subscription journals!
● What Can You Do To Avoid Bad Publishers
and Bad Science?
Presentation overview

• QUALITY OF PUBLISHING (SENSE)
Best Publishing Practices
• QUALITY OF RESEARCH (A LOT NON-SENSE)
scientific method, peer review, citation analysis, journal
ranking… all based on scores for the average article.
What is the Quality of a Journal?

Is there a problem?

• Quality of research
• scientific method: flawed
• peer review: best we have? Needs innovations!
• citation analysis: not suitable for quality assessment
• journal ranking .and impact factor: not a measure of quality
What is the Quality of a Journal?

Peer-review & the Quality of Research
Eisen JA, MacCallum CJ,
Neylon C (2013) Expert
Failure: Re-evaluating
Research Assessment.
PLoS Biol 11(10):
e1001677.
doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.10
01677

o citation analysis is critically flawed
o Citing does not necessarily mean having read, self-
citation, many articles instead of one, many authors
per article, author contribution difficult to assess, ghost
authors, journal impact factor not related to individual
article quality, impact factor biased for
English language journals
Citations & Quality of Research
Wageningen UR Library
NO IMPACT FACTORS

•
Is there a problem ?
YES
with quality of science AND with
quality of publishing
But is not specific for open access!

SOLUTION: QUALITY CONTROL
• DOAJ DIRECTORY OF OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS
OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS ONLY, NO RANKING, all
languages
• SCOPUS
OPEN ACCESS & SUBSCRIPTION JOURNALS ,
RANKING, biased for English language journals
• WEB OF SCIENCE
OPEN ACCESS & SUBSCRIPTION JOURNALS ,
RANKING, biased for English language journals
• NATIONAL LISTS
OPEN ACCESS & SUBSCRIPTION JOURNALS,
RANKING
• BLACKLISTS??

FACTS ABOUT QUALITY
• Not all subscription journals are in Scopus or WoS: only
20-30,000 of 100,000 (data Ulrich’s Web)
• Not all open access journals are in DOAJ : only 11,000 of
30,000 ***
CONCLUSION
Percentages of low Quality Journals are comparable
*** Walt Crawford
http://citesandinsights.info/civ17i1.pdf

Questionable Publishing in Perspective
Proportion of low quality journals is comparable
between open access and subscription publishing
… but it looks much worse because Open Access journals are
more visible
*** Walt Crawford
http://citesandinsights.info/civ17i1.pdf

• NOT ONLY IN OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS
• NOT AS HIGH IN OA AS OFTEN REPORTED
According to a study* by Walt Crawford the number of open access
questionable journals in 2014 was about 3275, publishing about 121,000
articles and not 420,000 (Shen and Björk ** reported 8000 journals and
420,000 articles!!)
The real numbers about questionable
publishing

Questionable Publishing in Perspective
Questionable journals
……………….are often low quality journals
………………………..and sometimes predatory journals
*** Walt Crawford
http://citesandinsights.info/civ17i1.pdf

Definition
predatory journals exist in both open access and
subscription journals according to the definition:
'inclined or intended to injure or exploit others for personal gain or
profit (Merriam-Webster)'

Consider this
● “Does exploiting the divide between libraries (that typically pay for subscriptions)
and scholars (who typically use the subscriptions) in order to make extraordinary
high profits constitute predatory conduct?”
or this:
● “Does continuing to raise prices at several times the rate of inflation, even as those
increases cause direct injury to libraries by robbing them of budget flexibility or even
make it impossible for them to continue to provide resources – does that constitute
predatory publishing?”
● Quotes from Walt Crawford!

A word on Blacklists

DOAJ avoids questionable journals that
have:
•Low publishing quality
Journal name, website, fees, peer review, publisher, ownership,
volume of articles, advertisements, prominent soliciting for editors
•Low scientific quality
focus, format, self-citations, plagiarism
• Malpractice
false claims, hidden costs, spamming authors, wrong
information, predatory behaviour

All DOAJ editors are aware of the signs
•Dedicated team investigating suspicious cases
2 Managing editors dedicated to this task
•Thorough and detailed procedures
standard approaches, comparisons, documentation, Appeal
procedure
• Measures for keeping bad journals out
no reapplications from proven questionable publishers for longer time
periods

•Number of Journals in DOAJ: 10,996
•Number of Articles linked in DOAJ: 2,858,729
•Number of Countries: 123
•Rejection Rate: 47%
• Number of Publishers (Journals) inadmissible for 1 year or
more: 316 (3123)
•Number of new Applications /Month: >400
•Number of Website Visitors / Month: 1 Million
DOAJ STATISTICS (Jan 2018)

Thanks to:
All the Library Consortia, Universities and Publishers and our
Sponsors for the financial support to DOAJ!

Thank you for your attention!
tom@doaj.org

DOAJ depends entirely on donations
https://doaj.org/membership