Posts

MDPI: A huge Predatory Publisher. It is clear MDPI is a predatory publisher and its journal Sustainability is a clear example of it.

It is clear that MDPI is a predatory publisher and its journal Sustainability is a clear example of it. See, for example, Sustainabilty scheduled for 2019 more than 680 special issues (plus 12 regular issues). More Details: http://widgren.blogspot.com/2019/02/is-mdpi-serious-publisher-or-predatory.html I was asked to review some articles for the MDPI journal, Diagnostics, about 2 years ago. The review process went smoothly and I was impressed at the speed the journal took from submission, to Editor consideration to send out for review, review by 2 or 3 reviewers, the response of the authors and subsequent re-review process to decision. The whole process time was about one month. Later, they contacted me to join the Diagnostics Editorial Board - that was in January 2019. Since then, I have been contacted about once or twice every 3 months to assess whether an article should go out for review. The Publishers never sent articles for review if I had indicated that they should not go...

Scholarly communication and matters of trust and authority: A comparative analysis of Malaysian and Chinese researchers

Scholarly communication and matters of trust and authority: A comparative analysis of Malaysian and Chinese researchers Scholarly communication andmatters of trust and authority:A comparative analysis ofMalaysian and Chinese researchers A. Abrizah (1,3), Jie Xu(2) and David Nicholas(3) 1 Department of Library & Information Science,Faculty of Computer Science & Information Technology University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, MALAYSIA 2 School of Information Management, Wuhan University, CHINA 3 CIBER Research Ltd., Newbury, Berkshire, UNITED KINGDOM e-mail: abrizah@um.edu.my (corresponding author);xuj@whu.edu.cn (corresponding author); Dave.Nicholas@ciber-research.eu ABSTRACT The study is a follow up of CIBER’s exploratory research on Trust and Authority in ScholarlyCommunications conducted in 2012-2013, investigating Malaysia, a country currently on the‘periphery’ of the scholarly endeavor and comparing with China, now stands and globally to the USA interms ...

Unethical Attacks to Open Access Publishing by Librarians: The Jeffrey Beall’s case.

Unethical Attacks to Open Access Publishing by Librarians: The Jeffrey Beall’s case. Mario E. Alonso, Francisco Pedro M. Lopez Abstract —In this paper we examine the phenomenon of several attempts to destroy the Open Access Publishing from various librarians. The was against Open Access (OA) publishing started with the librarian Jeffrey Beall who is a librarian at Auraria Library at the University of Colorado, Denver, USA. However, after some years the common sense among the scholars is that Jeffrey Beall does not have the necessary qualifications to evaluate the various publishers and journals as well as several voices exist that claim that Jeffrey Beall is permanently bribed. Several librarians consider Open Access publishers to be a threat to their profession because there is less need for a library or librarian if academic journals are available free on the Internet. At one point, this so-called “Beall’s List” blog even stated that publishers would be removed from the list if t...

"Entangled Histories: climate science and nuclear weapons research" by Paul N Edwards

"Entangled Histories: climate science and nuclear weapons research" by Paul N Edwards One more interesting paper by  Paul N Edwards https://www.academia.edu/2120293/Entangled_Histories_climate_science_and_nuclear_weapons_research?email_work_card=thumbnail

Prof. Paul N Edwards, Stanford University, Program in Science, Technology & Society, Director says about Open Access Publishing Commerce and the Scientific Ethos

Image
Prof. Paul N Edwards, Stanford University, Program in Science, Technology & Society, Director says about Open Access Publishing Commerce and the Scientific Ethos Dear Colleagues I write about the science, technology, and politics of knowledge and information infrastructures, with a specific focus on climate science and climate change. I'm also interested in critical data studies, algorithmic culture, and information science. Read my article  about Open Access Publishing Commerce and the Scientific Ethos here:   https://www.academia.edu/19598608/Open_Access_Publishing_Commerce_and_the_Scientific_Ethos_Report_to_the_Swiss_Science_and_Innovation_Council?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper

Elsevier published 6 fake journals

Image
  Elsevier published 6 fake journals https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/elsevier-published-6-fake-journals-44160 Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted. Elsevier is conducting an "internal review" of its publishing practices after allegations came to light that the company produced a pharmaceutical company-funded publication in the early 2000s without disclosing that the "journal" was corp Bob Grant Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted. Elsevier is conducting an "internal review" of its publishing practices after all...

Predator in the Pool? A Quantitative Evaluation of Non-indexed Open Access Journals in Aquaculture Research

Image
Predator in the Pool? A Quantitative Evaluation of Non-indexed Open Access Journals in Aquaculture Research Jeff C. Clements 1 * ,  Rémi M. Daigle 2  and  Halley E. Froehlich 3 1 Aquaculture and Coastal Ecosystems Section, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Gulf Fisheries Centre, Moncton, NB, Canada 2 Département de Biologie, Laval University, Québec, QC, Canada 3 National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States Predatory open access (OA) journals can be defined as non-indexed journals that exploit the gold OA model for profit, often spamming academics with questionable e-mails promising rapid OA publication for a fee. In aquaculture—a rapidly growing and highly scrutinized field—the issue of such journals remains undocumented. We employed a quantitative approach to determine whether attributes of scientific quality and rigor differed between OA aquaculture journals not indexed in reputable database...