How hyped media and misleading editorials can influence impressions about Beall’s lists of “predatory” publications
| Pages | 438-444 |
| Published date | 11 November 2019 |
| Date | 11 November 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JICES-06-2018-0059 |
| Author | Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva,Panagiotis Tsigaris |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information & communications technology |
How hyped media and misleading
editorials can influence
impressions about Beall’s lists
of “predatory”publications
Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva
Independent Researcher, Kagawa-ken, Japan, and
Panagiotis Tsigaris
Department of Economics, Thompson Rivers University,
Kamloops, Canada
Abstract
Purpose –The issue of “predatory”publishing and the scholarly value of journals that claim to operate
within an academic framework,namely, by using peer review and editorial quality control, but do not, while
attempting to extract openaccess (OA) or other publication-related fees, is an extremely importanttopic that
affects academics around the globe. Until 2017, global academia relied on two now-defunct Jeffrey Beall
“predatory”OA publishing blacklists to select their choice ofpublishing venue. This paper aims to explore
how mediahas played a role in spinning public impressions aboutthis issue.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors focus on a 2017 New York Times articleby Gina Kolata,
on a selected number of peer reviewed published papers on the topic of “predatory”publications and on an
editorialby the Editor-in-Chief of REM, a SciELO- and Scopus-indexed OA journal.
Findings –The Kolata article offers biased,inaccurate and potentially misleading information about the
state of “predatory”publishing:it relies heavily on the assumption that the now-defunctBeall blacklists were
accurate when infact they are not; it relies on a paper published in a non-predatory(i.e., non-Beall-listed) non-
OA journal that claimed incorrectly the existence of financial rewards by faculty members of a Canadian
business school from “predatory”publications; it praised a sting operation that used methods of deception
and falsification to achieve itsconclusions. The authors show how misleading information by the New York
Times wastransposed downstream via the REM editorial.
Originality/value –Educationof academics.
Keywords Censorship, Communication, Journalism, Journalism ethics, Corporate accountability,
Codes of ethics
Paper type Viewpoint
Hyped media and misleading editorials: the risks to scientific integrity
ANew York Times (NYT) article that was written by Gina Kolata is worthreading (Kolata,
2017a), but not precisely for the reasons indicatedin an editorial by the Editor-in-Chief of an
open access (OA) journal, REM - International Engineering Journal (REM)[1], Prof J
orio
Coelho (Coelho, 2018), as we explain in detail next. REM is indexed in Scientific Electronic
Library Online (SciELO) as well as Scopus, and published by a philanthropic group, the
Fundação Gorceix[2].
The issue of scientific integrity affectsall academics, editors and their journals by virtue
of the fact that many such journals, OA and non-OA, are linked by their references. Thus,
the academic quality of a paper that is cited by another academic needs to be carefully
JICES
17,4
438
Received30 June 2018
Accepted12 January 2019
Journalof Information,
Communicationand Ethics in
Society
Vol.17 No. 4, 2019
pp. 438-444
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1477-996X
DOI 10.1108/JICES-06-2018-0059
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