Wikipedia talk:Vanity and predatory publishing

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Academic Journals

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Reliability

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Evidence needed for each claim

The claim that a given journal is "predatory" should be accompanied by evidence in the edit summary or the talk page of the article in question. As a specific example consider the article on Carbon dioxide, in which a reference on Supercritical fluid extraction by Sapkale et al. was deleted yesterday with the brief comment "predatory journal". The reference was to the Indian journal "International Journal of Chemical Sciences" whose website at [1] claims that the journal is peer reviewed and that "All the papers are reviewed by subject experts before publication.". I have no idea if this is true, but before accepting that it is false, I would like to see a reliable source which says so. This essay does present a number of possible red flags, but the editor who brands a specific source as predatory should indicate which red flag was used in that case. Dirac66 (talk) 21:38, 23 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Dirac66: concerning the International Journal of Chemical Sciences, this is published by Trade Science Inc (http://www.tsijournals.com/), a publisher listed on Beall's list (this is the new website, but it contains the original list by Beall) as well as Cabell's blacklist. Trade Science is also a shell company of the OMICS Publishing Group, also on Beall's and Cabell's lists. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:02, 23 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Headbomb: OK, thank you. That does answer my question for this example. In general, I think that analogous information should be provided whenever a source is deleted as predatory, either in the edit summary or on the talk page. Dirac66 (talk) 00:52, 23 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

"Write-only" publishers

I just noticed that publications published by IGI Global are colored in red by the script, which surprised me. Digging around, I see it is considered a "write-only" publisher, and that seems to have been conflated with poor reputation for fact-checking, fails to correct errors, is self-published, presents user-generated content, violates copyrights, or is otherwise of low-quality. This led me to wonder what evidence there was of this? The main criticism I've found is that they charge a lot for the books, betting on selling them to the libraries where the authors work. I'm not a fan of that (just like I'm not a fan of journals charging a lot for access), but no purchase is required, authors aren't charged anything, and I haven't seen any evidence presented that its publications are systematically lacking in rigor/quality.

Disclosure/back-story: several years ago, I came across a CFP for a chapter in an IGI book that was a really good fit for a paper I was working on. I recognized the name from something I had recently read, agreed, and moved forward with it. It went through three rounds of peer review (two in the process of publication and one external), and is still [occasionally] cited (despite the "write-only" implication, WorldCat says 127 libraries have a copy, though more would've been better). I saw that the business model was indeed obnoxious and was disappointed that few would actually read it, but was happy with the project and it didn't seem all that different from some niche closed access journal that nonetheless has a fine enough reputation. To be clear, I'm not looking to cite myself (or to be cited on Wikipedia), I'm only mentioning my experience for context and transparency.

If there is evidence of a poor reputation for errors, self-publication, copyrights, yada yada, could someone point to it? Otherwise it's unsettling that, in the absence of such evidence, somehow because a publisher charges libraries too much for their books, we treat everything they publish at the same level of reliability as, say, random user-generated content on Facebook or YouTube. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 16:48, 8 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]