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Jeffrey Beall

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Jeffrey Beall
NationalityAmerican
Alma materCalifornia State University, Northridge, Oklahoma State University, University of North Carolina
OccupationLibrarian at the University of Colorado, Denver
Known forCriticism of predatory open access publishing

Jeffrey Beall is a librarian and associate professor at Auraria Library at the University of Colorado, Denver.

Education and career

Beall has a bachelor's degree in Spanish from California State University, Northridge (1982), as well as an MA in English from Oklahoma State University (1987) and an MSc in library science from the University of North Carolina (1990). Until December 2012, Beall served on the editorial board of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. In that same year, he was awarded tenure by UC-Denver. In an interview with The Charleston Advisor in July 2013, Beall said that his biggest influence was Fred Kilgour.

Criticism of open access publishing

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In December 2013, Beall published a comment in tripleC, an open access journal, in which he articulated his criticism of open access publishing in general. He portrays open access publishing as an “anti-corporatist movement” whose advocates pursue the goal of "kill off the for-profit publishers and mak scholarly publishing a cooperative and socialistic enterprise”. Further, he considers that the “open access movement is a Euro-dominant one, a neo-colonial attempt to cast scholarly communication policy according to the aspirations of a cliquish minority of European collectivists”. According to Beall, “the emergence of numerous predatory publishers” has been “a product of the open-access movement”.

In a subsequent article published by Joseph Esposito on his blog, Scholarly Kitchen, Esposito commented that "much of what he says seems to me to be correct, but simply overstated and stuffed inside a political wrapper".

Criticism of predatory open access publishing

Beall has been a librarian for 22 years and is well known for his opposition to predatory open access publishing, a term he coined. He has published a number of analyses of predatory OA journals such as one of Bentham Open in The Charleston Advisor in 2009. However, his interest in such journals began when, in 2008, he began receiving numerous requests from dubious journals to serve on their editorial boards. He has said that he "immediately became fascinated because most of the e-mails contained numerous grammatical errors." He has since produced a well-known and regularly updated list of what he states are predatory open access publishers.

Beall's list and Science sting

In 2013, Science published the results of a "sting" in which a scientifically flawed spoof publication was submitted to open access publications. Many accepted the manuscript, and a disproportionate number of the accepting journals were on Beall's list. The publication, entitled Who's Afraid of Peer Review?, stated that "The results show that Beall is good at spotting publishers with poor quality control: For the publishers on his list that completed the review process, 82% accepted the paper." Beall agreed, saying that the author of the sting, John Bohannon, "basically found what I've been saying for years."

Legal threat

In 2013, it was reported that OMICS Publishing Group, which had been included on Beall's list of predatory open access publishers, had issued a warning to Beall stating that they intended to sue him, and were seeking $1 billion in damages. In their six-pages-long letter, OMICS stated that Beall's blog is "ridiculous, baseless, impertinent," and "smacks of literal unprofessionalism and arrogance." Beall was quoted as saying that he found the letter "to be poorly written and personally threatening," and that he thought "...the letter is an attempt to detract from the enormity of OMICS's editorial practices." OMICS publishing group's journals are as poorly managed as “Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences” published by ELSEVIER but Mr Beall does not criticize this journal. This kind of behaviour clearly shows his bias comments.

References

  1. "Beall's Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). auraria.edu. Auraria Library. Retrieved 25 November 2013.
  2. About the author
  3. Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.5260/chara.15.1.50, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.5260/chara.15.1.50 instead.
  4. Beall, Jeffrey (2013). "The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access". tripleC. 11 (2): 589–597. Retrieved 27 March 2014.
  5. Esposito, Joseph. "Parting Company with Jeffrey Beall". Retrieved 27 March 2014.
  6. Beall, Jeffrey (September 2009). "Bentham Open". The Charleston Advisor. 11 (1): 29–32.
  7. Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1038/495433a, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1038/495433a instead.
  8. "LIST OF PUBLISHERS | Scholarly Open Access". Scholarlyoa.com. Retrieved 2014-01-18.
  9. Kolata, Gina (7 April 2013). "Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too)". New York Times. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
  10. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite pmid}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by PMID 24092725, please use {{cite journal}} with |pmid=24092725 instead.
  11. Knox, Richard (3 October 2013). "Some Online Journals Will Publish Fake Science, For A Fee". NPR. Retrieved 3 May 2014.
  12. New, Jake (15 May 2013). "Publisher Threatens to Sue Blogger for $1-Billion". Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
  13. Chappell, Bill (15 May 2013). "Publisher Threatens Librarian With $1 Billion Lawsuit". NPR. Retrieved 18 January 2014.

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