"Scientific literacy must include the ability to recognize publishing fraud"

http://www.nature.com/news/predatory-publishers-are-corrupting-open-access-1.11385

Predatory publishers are corrupting open access

Journals that exploit the author-pays model damage scholarly publishing and promote unethical behaviour by scientists, argues Jeffrey Beall.

12 September 2012

"When e-mail first became available, it was a great innovation that made communication fast and cheap. Then came spam — and suddenly, the innovation wasn’t so great. It meant having to filter out irrelevant, deceptive and sometimes offensive messages. It still does.

The same corruption of a great idea is now occurring with scholarly open-access publishing.

Early experiments with open-access publishing, such as the Journal of Medical Internet Researchand BioMed Central, were very promising. Set up more than a decade ago, they helped to inspire a social movement that has changed academic publishing for the better, lowered costs and expanded worldwide access to the latest research.

Then came predatory publishers, which publish counterfeit journals to exploit the open-access model in which the author pays. These predatory publishers are dishonest and lack transparency. They aim to dupe researchers, especially those inexperienced in scholarly communication. 

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Here, the problem is not just with the publishers. Scientists themselves are also to blame. Many are taking unethical shortcuts and paying for the publication of plagiarized or self-plagiarized work.

Honest scientists stand to lose the most in this unethical quagmire.

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To tackle the problem, scholars must resist the temptation to publish quickly and easily. The research community needs to use scholarly social networks such as Connotea and Mendeley to identify and share information on publishers that deceive, lack transparency or otherwise fail to follow industry standards. Scientific literacy must include the ability to recognize publishing fraud, and libraries must remove predatory publishers from their online catalogues."