Bioethicists taking on questionable publishers ... in ethics

Stefan Eriksson at Uppsala University and his colleague Gert Helgesson at the Karolinska Institute have undertaken the commendable job of creating two lists of English language bioethics journals, one featuring journals published by reputable publishers and another one featuring journals associated with other publishing outfits. Each of their critical choices is accompanied by links providing evidence in support of their concerns about the journals/publishers in question. It is doubtful that some of the questionable journals actually qualify as journals in any meaningful way. There is one such journal, for instance, that published a full one article in its three years of existence. The wonders of fee-for-upload open access publishing...

The list created by Ericsson and Helgesson should prove to be tremendously useful as a guide for junior faculty who wonder where to submit their first academic outputs for peer review, but it's also helpful to those of us who have been around for longer and are asked to provide sound publishing advice that goes beyond guessing the quality of particular journals.

Not unexpectedly, the list isn't quite complete, even as far as English language journals are concerned (e.g. the superb Indian Journal of Medical Ethics is missing in action), but it's a great start, and undoubtedly future iterations of the list will move closer to comprehensiveness. The list also does not aim to include journals other than English language journals. It's probably a fair enough approach as it would be a mammoth task indeed to check whether particular journal titles in other languages fall into one or the other category of publications.

and a late comer to the Open Access Party ... the New York Times

Just about every outlet in the universe has written about the pitfalls of Open Access digital only 'academic publishing'. Today the New York Times joined the party. It's not a bad piece actually, written by veteran health reporter Gina Kolata. Check it out when you have a minute! It's centered around Beall's list of predatory on-line 'publishers'. What's lacking are reasonable explanations of what made this fiasco possible. Low barriers to market entry anyone?

Meanwhile ever more research funders are rushing headlong into forcing researchers they fund to publish their content in open access outlets. All of this, of course, is giving rise to ever more dodgy 'publishers' opening up their business, aka uploading submitted content to their webserver for a steep fee. Worse, upcoming research assessment exercises force academics in some places to publish their research outputs in open access outfits without providing funding for the uploading activity (aka open access publishing). You better forget about the idea of having reliable publishing histories attached to academic content. Courtesy of Open Access the powers that are have fully embraced a wild west version of what was once known as academic publishing. It'll no doubt come to bite them in their backside, but I suspect those responsible will long have left when the consequences of these ill-considered policies hit the proverbial fan.