Jeffrey Beall

Jeffrey Beall
Beall in 2005
Nationality	American
Alma mater	California State University, Northridge, Oklahoma State University, University of North Carolina
Occupation	Librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver
Known for	Criticism of predatory open access publishing
Website	Scholarly Open Access: scholarlyoa.com

Jeffrey Beall is a librarian and associate professor at Auraria Library at the University of Colorado, Denver. He is a critic of the open access publishing movement and is especially known for his blog, Scholarly Open Access, which monitors "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined. Beall has also written on this topic in The Charleston Advisor, in Nature, and in Learned Publishing.

Education and career

Beall has a bachelor's degree in Spanish from California State University, Northridge (1982), as well as an MA in English from Oklahoma State University (1987) and an MSc in library science from the University of North Carolina (1990). Until December 2012, Beall served on the editorial board of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. In that same year, he was awarded tenure by UC-Denver. In an interview with The Charleston Advisor in July 2013, Beall said that his biggest influence was Fred Kilgour.

Criticism of open access publishing

Beall has said that "The only truly successful model that I have seen is the traditional publishing model." In December 2013, Beall published a comment in tripleC, an open access journal, in which he articulated his criticism of open access publishing in general. He portrays open access publishing as an anti-corporatist movement whose advocates pursue the goal of "kill[ing] off the for-profit publishers and mak[ing] scholarly publishing a cooperative and socialistic enterprise". Further, he considers that the "open access movement is a Euro-dominant one, a neo-colonial attempt to cast scholarly communication policy according to the aspirations of a cliquish minority of European collectivists". According to Beall, "the emergence of numerous predatory publishers” has been "a product of the open-access movement". He has also been critical of the Directory of Open Access Journals for relying on data supplied by journal publishers to determine whether the journal in question should be included in the directory.

Criticism of predatory open access publishing

Beall is well known for his investigations of predatory open access publishing, a term he coined. He has published a number of analyses of predatory OA journals such as one of Bentham Open in The Charleston Advisor in 2009. However, his interest in such journals began when, in 2008, he started to receive numerous requests from dubious journals to serve on their editorial boards. He has said that he "immediately became fascinated because most of the e-mails contained numerous grammatical errors." Since 2008, he has maintained a well-known and regularly updated list of what he states are "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". Beall has estimated that predatory open access journals publish about 5-10 percent of all open access articles, and that at least 25 percent of open access journals are predatory.

Counter-criticism

Phil Davies, in an analysis of the Bohannon sting operation, observed that "Beall is falsely accusing nearly one in five as being a 'potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publisher' on appearances alone.". He continues to say that Jeffrey Beall should reconsider listing publishers on his 'predatory' list until he has evidence of wrongdoing. Being mislabeled as a 'potential, possible, or probable predatory publisher' by circumstantial evidence alone is like the sheriff of a Wild West town throwing a cowboy into jail just ‘cuz he’s a little funny lookin.’ Civility requires due process.".

Joseph Esposito wrote in the Scholarly Kitchen that he has been following some of Beall's work with "growing unease" and that his "broader critique (really an assault) of Gold OA and those who advocate it" (...) "crosses the line".

Wayne Bivens-Tatum, librarian at Princeton University, published a rebuttal in tripleC, regarding Beall's criticisms of open access publishing. He stated that Beall's "rhetoric provides good examples of what Albert O. Hirschman called the 'rhetoric of reaction'", and concluded Beall's "argument fails because the sweeping generalizations with no supporting evidence render it unsound." City University of New York librarians Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella said his views are biased against open-access journals from less economically developed countries. Berger and Cirasella argue that "imperfect English or a predominantly non-Western editorial board does not make a journal predatory". While recognizing that "the criteria he uses for his list are an excellent starting point for thinking about the hallmarks of predatory publishers and journals," they suggest that: "Given the fuzziness between low-quality and predatory publishers, whitelisting, or listing publishers and journals that have been vetted and verified as satisfying certain standards, may be a better solution than blacklisting. The central player in the whitelisting movement is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)." The managing director of DOAJ, Lars Bjørnshauge, estimates that questionable publishing probably accounts for fewer than 1% of all author-pays, open-access papers, a proportion far lower than Beall's estimate of 5-10%. Instead of relying on blacklists, Bjørnshauge argues that open-access associations such as the DOAJ and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association should adopt more responsibility for policing publishers: they should lay out a set of criteria that publishers and journals must comply with to win a place on a 'white list' indicating that they are trustworthy. Rick Anderson, associate dean in the J. Willard Marriot Library, University of Utah, challenges the term 'predatory open access publishing' itself: “what do we mean when we say ‘predatory,’ and is that term even still useful?... This question has become relevant because of that common refrain heard among Beall’s critics: that he only examines one kind of predation—the kind that naturally crops up in the context of author-pays OA.” Anderson suggests that the term “predatory” be retired in the context of scholarly publishing. “It’s a nice, attention-grabbing word, but I’m not sure it’s helpfully descriptive… it generates more heat than light.”

Beall's list and the Science sting

In 2013, Science published the results of a sting operation in which a scientifically flawed spoof publication was submitted to open access publications. Many accepted the manuscript, and a disproportionate number of the accepting journals were on Beall's list. The publication, entitled Who's Afraid of Peer Review?, concluded that Beall is "good at spotting publishers with poor quality control". Of publishers on his list that completed the review process, it was accepted by 82%. Beall remarked that the author of the sting, John Bohannon, "basically found what I've been saying for years."

Legal threats

In February 2013, the open-access publisher Canadian Center for Science and Education sent a letter to Beall stating that Beall's inclusion of their company on his list of questionable open-access publishers amounted to defamation. The letter also stated that if Beall did not remove this company from his list, they would subject him to "civil action".

In May 2013, it was reported that OMICS Publishing Group, which had also been included on Beall's list of predatory open access publishers, had issued a warning to Beall stating that they intended to sue him, and were seeking $1 billion in damages. In their six-pages-long letter, OMICS stated that Beall's blog is "ridiculous, baseless, impertinent," and "smacks of literal unprofessionalism and arrogance." Beall was quoted as saying that he found the letter "to be poorly written and personally threatening," and that he thought "...the letter is an attempt to detract from the enormity of OMICS's editorial practices."

External links

• Official website
• Profile at Google Scholar