Home 9 Blog Posts 9 Our Lives as Editors of a Predatory Journal: Lessons Learned Publishing a Scholarly Open Access Journal

Our Lives as Editors of a Predatory Journal: Lessons Learned Publishing a Scholarly Open Access Journal

by | Nov 10, 2017 | 0 comments

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Jill Emery, Jonathan Cain, Michael Levine-Clark

(L-R) Jill Emery, Jonathan Cain, Michael Levine-Clark

These speakers described their experiences since they began editing the  journal Collaborative Librarianship (CL) in 2016. Here are some facts about the journal.

Collaborative Librarianship

Most of the workflow is done by email. They are happy with Digital Commons for managing reviewers.

Many journals use Beall’s Criteria to detect predatory journals (see the preprint of an article by Olivarez et al for reasons why to use them). CL does not use Beall’s criteria.

Emery and Levine-Clark looked at 18 journals in the Web of Science database and found that in almost all cases of scholarship, there were one or two areas where CL could be improved. In some cases, CL was acting like a predatory journal. For example, one of their reviewers detected that an article was already published elsewhere. It was not a malicious intent, just an author wanting wider dissemination of his work, so they had to contact the author and ask that the paper be revised. Articles in many of the early issues of CL do not have DOIs; as a result, CL lost its listing in the DOAJ. CrossRef has been asked to help add the missing DOIs.

Progress has been made in improving CL’s quality; it has:

  • IIncreased its impact factor through coverage in Google and Google Scholar.
  • Reestablished a regular column by bringing outside authors.
  • Clearly stated authors’ rights.
  • Established best practice recommendations as specified by the Journal Transfer Code of Practice and joined the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
  • Begun using the Journal Transfer Protocol for the input of new article manuscripts.

Some of these things may be difficult for a small publisher. Some things were compounded by not doing them earlier. It is important to ensure ethical editorial practices by making sure that reviewers declare that they have no biases and spell out what the peer review process involves.

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