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A group for CUNY faculty, staff, and graduate students interested in open access publishing for scholarly communication, open educational resources, and open teaching and scholarship.

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Tapping Jeffrey Beall

  • I got an email forwarded by a colleague from U. Penn’s CFPs website http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/52281 about an interdisciplinary conference that certainly smells funky to me. At a meeting of my college’s interdisciplinary (curriculum) committee, I noticed a print out of the CFP and it had a nice scene of a sunset over a town on the ocean as its header and my immediate reaction was: *junket* This was the print out of the CFP that she forgot to hand over to me. It’s unclear if she wanted me to check out the legitimacy of the conference or simply repost it to our local webspace.

    The journal of the conference provider is listed on DOAJ and is not on Beall’s list. Lots of signals that the publisher is predatory but perhaps just low quality. So, taking a leap forward, I decided to email Beall directly and ask his opinion. Let’s see if he responds!

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  • Beall wrote back to me immediately agreeing that this conference and publisher are not obviously predatory but clearly low quality. He is being cautious in his approach about labeling a publisher as predatory in borderline cases. Apparently others have asked him about this publisher and journal.

    This reaffirms that there is definitely gray space in between legitimate and predatory publishers–the phenomenon of very low quality.

    I like that phrase: “the phenomenon of very low quality.” Not as pernicious as predatory but not anything we’d encourage anyone to be affiliated with.

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