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"Blacklists" and "whitelists" to tackle predatory publishing : A cross-sectional comparison and thematic analysis

️Wed Feb 13 2019

NOT PEER-REVIEWED

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1 Swiss National Science Foundation, Bern, Switzerland

2 Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM), University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

DOI

10.7287/peerj.preprints.27532v1

Published

2019-02-13

Accepted

2019-02-13

Subject Areas

Ethical Issues, Science Policy

Keywords

predatory publishing, journal whitelists and blacklists, professional standards, ethics, open access, business practices, peer review, transparency, scholarly communication

Licence

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

Cite this article

Strinzel M, Severin A, Milzow K, Egger M. 2019. "Blacklists" and "whitelists" to tackle predatory publishing : A cross-sectional comparison and thematic analysis. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27532v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27532v1

Abstract

Background. Despite growing awareness of predatory publishing and research on its market characteristics, the defining attributes of fraudulent journals remain controversial. We aimed to develop a better understanding of quality criteria for scholarly journals by analysing journals and publishers indexed in blacklists of predatory journals and whitelists of legitimate journals and the lists’ inclusion criteria. Methods. We searched for blacklists and whitelists in early 2018. Lists that included journals across disciplines were eligible. We used a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative analyses. To quantify overlaps between lists in terms of indexed journals and publishers we employed the Jaro-Winkler string metric and Venn diagrams. To identify topics addressed by the lists’ inclusion criteria and to derive their broader conceptual categories, we used a qualitative coding approach. Results. Two blacklists (Beall’s and Cabell’s) and two whitelists (DOAJ and Cabell’s) were eligible. The number of journals per list ranged from 1404 to 12357 and the number of publishers from 473 to 5638. Seventy-three journals and 42 publishers were included both in a blacklist and whitelist. A total of 198 inclusion criteria were examined. Seven thematic themes were identified: (i) peer review, (ii) editorial services, (iii) policy, (iv) business practices, (v) publishing, archiving and access, (vi) website and (vii) indexing and metrics. Business practices accounted for almost half of blacklists’ criteria, whereas whitelists gave more emphasis to criteria related to policy and guidelines. Criteria were grouped into four broad concepts: (i) transparency, (ii) ethics, (iii) professional standards and (iv) peer review and other services. Whitelists gave more weight to transparency whereas blacklists focused on ethics and professional standards. The criteria included in whitelists were easier to verify than those used in blacklists. Both types of list gave relatively little emphasis to the quality of peer review. Conclusions. There is overlap between journals and publishers included in blacklists and whitelists. Blacklists and whitelists differ in their criteria for quality and the weight given to different dimensions of quality. Aspects that are central but difficult to verify receive insufficient attention.

Author Comment

This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.

Supplemental Information

List of names of journals and publishers included in a blacklist and a whitelist

List of criteria by whitelist or blacklist, topic, concept and verifiability

Distribution of inclusion criteria across seven thematic topics for the four included lists individually

Distribution of inclusion criteria across four concepts for all four lists individually

1

Table 2 states that DOAJ is maintained by a community of open access publishers which isn't quite right. DOAJ is maintained by the 100+ volunteers and a core team of 15 people, employed by DOAJ's holding company IS4OA.

The journals titles in the supplementary information (supp 1) should be listed with their ISSNs to avoid ambiguity. For example: there are 2 journals called 'International journal of pediatrics': http://bit.ly/2ttZI9K

0

You wrote: ''we also encourage future research to further investigate the concepts of quality, transparency (...) specifically with regard to peer review'.

Could you develop your thought about the recent use of reviewing system based on AI?

Many publishers ask for total copyright transfer from authors, even for OA articles. This is enabling publisher to develop AI tools for peer-reviewing, that are under commercial secret.

Therefore, evaluation of quality and transparency of peer-review system may become even obscurer as now. In summary, there is an issue with copyright transfer, AI and peer-reviewing, that may be even not improved by use of CC licences on articles.

Since December 2018, Elsevier did not answer questions worries about AI tool for peer-reviewing. Nothing is transparent or explained. Access to code may be not possible.

Key questions:

- How to evaluate then transparency and quality of peer-reviewing, if the AI peer-reviewing tool becomes a black box?

- How to develop an automatical tool for peer-reviewing as an opportunity and not a threat to quality and transparency assessment?

Your article is not about this subject, but maybe questioning this aspect of technological development could be relevant?

See

ai-can-solve-peer-review-ai-can-solve-anything and

http://publicationscientifiquesuisse.blogspot.com/2018/12/copyright-researchers-ai-publishers.html

0

Please note that following an internal system error, when the authors accessed the Cabells Whitelist and Blacklist they identified one publisher on both lists. This should not have appeared, and the issue has been rectified - there are no publishers or journals that are simultaneously on the Cabells Whitelist and Blacklist.

Simon Linacre, Director of International Marketing & Development, Cabells

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"Blacklists" and "whitelists" to tackle predatory publishing : A cross-sectional comparison and thematic analysis