Grey-zone between legitimate and predatory scholarly publishing
Creators: name: Pölönen, Janne
name: Sivertsen, Gunnar
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021
Subjects: Scholarly publishing
Predatory journals
Peer review
Journal lists

description: According to the 2018 report by International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, there could be 70,000 academic/scholarly journals in the world. At one end of the wide spectrum are journal recognized in the scientific communities for having strong, reliable editorial and peer-review standards and practices. At the other end are journals with no, weak or deceptive peer-review. Between these extremes, there also exists a grey-zone of journals whose peer review status is ambiguous in the sense that they exhibit both reliable and questionable practices. So-called questionable or predatory journals take advantage of the APC-based OA publishing model, claiming but failing to practice proper scientific quality control by experts in the field. While there is no universally agreed definition of questionable journal, whitelists and blacklists have been relied on to steer researchers and evaluators between properly peer-reviewed journals and those failing the standards of academic rigor. Examples of international whitelists include DOAJ - the Directory of Open Access Journals, as well as the lists of Web of Science and Scopus indexed journals. In some countries - including Denmark, Finland and Norway - also national authority lists developed to support performance-based research funding systems have served the purpose of whitelist. The infamous Beall’s list is now defunct and subject to Scientometrics retraction case raised by Frontiers. The most well-known international blacklist remains the Cabells Predatory reports, which checks journals based on more than 70 criteria. Also DOAJ has made available a list of journals removed on the grounds of suspected editorial misconduct. Early warning list of 65 international journals, published in 2020 by the Chinese Academy of Science, is an interesting intermediate solution, highlighting journals with risk characteristics and potential quality issues. For example, MDPI journals, recently subject to study pubished in Resaerch Evaluation journal, figure prominently in this list. But so does, for example, also APC-based megajournal IEEE Advances. The critieria for inclusion include, among others, number of articles, internationality of authors, funding model (APC), as well as rejection, self-citation and retraction rates Whatever the merits of the Chinese lists, it enables us to show the possible shortcomings of the whitelists and blacklists when it comes to addressing quality concerns. And indeed, researchers and evaluation and funding system relying on these lists should perhaps be concerned, because the whitelists we analysed include almost all 65 journals, while they are almost exempt from the blacklists – notably Cabells. We noticed specifically that some of the journals are included among the leading titles in the Nordic lists: 1 in Finland and 4 in Denmark. In Norway and Finland there is a strong increase in the article output in the MDPI and Frontiers journals. This development is undoubtedly great for open access, but it is also fair to ask if this increase in the quantity takes place at the expense of quality, and is this a healthy development from the perspective of the open access costs and spending of public funds? Nevertheless, our main point is that the whitelists and blacklists are typically based on quite formal and technical criteria, which may not be able to sufficiently capture some of the quality concerns, such as raised by the Chinese list. In Denmark and Finland, for example, panels of experts are involved in the approval of journals to the authority lists (so-called level 1), however they may take an overtly cautious approach to handling of grey-zone journals because the lists are connected to national funding schemes. We suggest that a possible solution for addressing quality concerns could be a list of recommendable journals with strong and well-recognized contribution to knowledge-base and scholarly communication. Such list should be based on assessment by experts in the field, but unconnected to any assessment of funding system.