Jeffrey Beall, retirado de la University of Colorado, Denver, Estados Unidos. Conferencia presentada en el 4.° Encuentro Regional de Editores de Revistas Académicas 2019. Journals & Authors, Medellín - Colombia.

1. El Acceso Abierto y las Revistas
Depredadoras: Un Paso
Adelante y Dos Pasos Hacia
Atrás
Jeffrey Beall
ORCID number 0000-0001-9012-5330

4. Revistas depredadoras: una crisis ética en la publicación

5. Introducción
• Predatory publishers = Editores depredadores
• Scholarly publishing = Edición académica
• Science and pseudo-science = La ciencia y la pseudo-ciencia
• Scholarly publishing scams = Estafas en la edición académica
• The open-access movement = El movimento de acceso abierto

6. Publishing models for scholarly journals
Modelos de edición de revistas académicas
• Traditional (subscription) model
• Hybrid open-access
• Platinum open-access = free to author, free to reader
• Delayed open access = subscription model but OA after some
time
• Gold open access = free to reader, author pays a fee

7. Predatory publishers and journals
Editores y revistas depredadores
• Predatory publishers (journals) are those that exploit the gold open-
access model for their own profit
• They take advantage of, exploit, and pander (complacen las exigencias
de) to scholarly authors
• They pretend (fingen) to be legitimate, copying established and
respected journals' websites and practices
• Many do a poor or fake peer review
• Some name themselves as "Institutes," "Associations," or "Centers"
• Some operate as single mega-journals

8. Gold (author pays) open-access [1]
• Publishing costs financed by fees charged to authors upon
acceptance of their articles
• The customers are the authors (not libraries, not readers)
• Low barrier to startup
• Immediate revenue generation
• Low overhead
• Proven business model, easy to copy
• Ever-growing customer base

9. Gold (author pays) open-access [2]
• Conflict of interest: More articles = more publisher income
• No organization looks out for the interests of scholarly authors
• Makes it hard for scholarly societies to generate income from
their publishing programs
• Making publishing free for authors would solve many problems
• We're giving up on the selectivity that the subscription
publishing model provided

10. materia oscura
y energía
oscura

14. History of predatory publishers
• I first started to receive spam email solicitations from
publishers in 2008 and 2009
• My first publication about a predatory publisher was in 2009
• I coined the term "predatory publisher" in summer 2010
• I started my blog in early 2012 — and ended it in 2017
• Not all open-access journals are predatory

15. History of predatory publishers

17. Predatory Medical Journals
Revistas Médicas Depredadoras

18. How predatory publishers damage science [1]
• They've increased published research misconduct (mala conducta
en la investigación), such as plagiarism
• The pseudo-science they publish gets indexed in Google Scholar
and other academic indexes
• They threaten demarcation, the division between science and
pseudo-science, the cumulative nature of research (naturaleza
cumulativa de la investigación)
• They feed bogus research to societal institutions that depend on
authentic science
• They publish activist science and conspiracy-theory science
(ciencia de teoría de la conspiración)

19. How predatory publishers damage science [2]
• They are polluting taxonomy
• Many also sponsor bogus scholarly conferences
• Pharmaceutical entrepreneurs are using predatory
publishers to make invented compounds appear efficacious
• Author fees (tasas de publicación) may prevent some authors
from being able to publish their work, especially those in
middle-income countries and unaffiliated researchers

20. Five theses on scholarly publishing
Cinco tesis sobre la edición académica
• The open-access model has created more serious problems than
those it has solved.
• Green open-access is essentially dead.
• Academic libraries should not take on the role of scholarly publishers
= Las bibliotecas académicas no deben asumir el papel de los editores
académicos.
• Open access is disintermediating academic librarians = El acceso
abierto causa la desintermediación de los bibliotecarios académicos

21. Napoleon A. Chagnon
“… anthropology has
become more like a
religion — where major
truths are established
by faith, not facts”
(p. 232).

22. http://www.hoajonline.com/autism/2054-992X/3/1

23. Predatory Journals and Academic Evaluation [1]
• Universities use scholarly publications as a measure of academic
achievement
• Academic managers want objective evaluation methods: lists,
bibliometrics (bibliometría)
• Scholarly publishing has changed, but evaluation systems have not
changed
• It is very easy now to get an article published in an OA journal
• Evaluation systems based on counting are no longer valid
• Some researchers take advantage of easy publishing

24. Predatory Journals and Academic Evaluation [2]
•At many universities, academic evaluation is
broken
•If you use a whitelist, many seek out the
list’s “easiest” journals
•Researchers who publish in top journals feel
cheated

25. My (former) work

26. Indirect Victims of Predatory Publishers
• Those who are inundated with spam
• Those preparing literature reviews (Revisiones literarias)
• Those preparing review articles and systematic reviews (Revisiones
sistemáticas), and meta-analyses (metaanálisis)
• Those who take the high road, only to see colleagues advance
academically through high numbers of publications in predatory
journals
• Students preparing class papers

27. FTC lawsuit against OMICS International
pleito

29. Fake Impact Factor Companies

30. Hijacked
Journals

31. The stigma of predatory publishers
• Publishing an article in a predatory journal can harm a researcher's
reputation
• Membership on a predatory journal's editorial board (consejo de
redacción) reflects poorly on the individual and his institution
• Articles published in legitimate journals that cite conclusions from
earlier articles in predatory journals may be seen as questionable =
• Los artículos publicados en revistas legítimas que citan conclusiones
de artículos publicados anteriormente en revistas depredadores
pueden ser vistos como cuestionables

32. Questionable conferences

33. Science
“Since science is our most reliable source of
knowledge, in a wide variety of areas, we
need to distinguish scientific knowledge
from its look-alikes.”
“Dado que la ciencia es nuestra fuente de
conocimiento más fiable, en una amplia
variedad de áreas, necesitamos distinguir el
conocimiento científico de sus semejantes.”
—S.O. Hansson.

34. Conclusion
• The author-pays model is a major cultural change in scholarly
publishing that has led to the creation of many scams
• We have given up on selectivity in scholarly publishing = Hemos
renunciado a la selectividad en la publicación académica
• Predatory journals threaten the integrity of science
• Scholarly authors are now consumers of publishing services, but
there's no organization that represents their interests

35. Thank you
Junio 2019
•Jeffrey Beall,
jeffrey.beall@ucdenver.edu