MCLC: David Publishing (2)

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David Publishing (2)
This is not a new story: There is a huge industry of similar cheat journals from fake publishers trying to scam author's fees from academics eager to publish, anywhere.
The scam journals typically try to look like they are legit, such as by listing a (fake) address in New York; by having a nice looking (but fake) website; or by listing legitimate, existing academics as editors. Sometimes they have never asked those people if they wanted to be listed, and sometimes people have allowed themselves to be listed because they have felt flattered to be asked, by the scammers, and have fallen for the scheme.
I know of one case where an entire fake editorial board, consisting of real people, resigned en masse, because they finally realized that this was a fake scam with nothing academic about it; its so-called "peer review" was only pretense, etc." It was all about collecting several hundred dollars from each easy-to-fool academic dying to bolster his CV, his "citations count" etc., so, not a journal but a scam.
Beall's list of fake or suspected fake publishers (which you cited, https://scholarlyoa.com), is a good first stop to check on the name/cover under which various operators do this, many are either out of China (carried on in the time-honored Chinese tradition of for-profit forgery and scamming) or out of some other countries. Beall has done a lot of research, and has followed many of these scammers over the years so he knows who they are and can recognize new ones when they pop up, whether in new disguise, or launched by new scammers.
One downside about Beall (a librarian in Denver) is that he seems to be taking a stand against open access publishing as such, which many certainly would disagree with, since there are quite a few legitimate online scholarly journals that are open access (take for example Hau, haujournal.org, in my own field of anthropology).
The problem is that developments in the publishing industry as a whole has opened the opportunity for the scamming. Open access formula journals too are often financed by author's fees (sometimes subsidized by the author's universities who may also be caught up in the circus of citation counting, etc., and thus wants to pay their academics to be more "visible", and who may lack competence to discern the fake from the real publishing opportunity).
To have author's fees as a financing model need not be evil in itself, as an alternative to the ridiculous for-profit scheme of the big hegemonic science journal publishers who for a racket of their own, charging exorbitant, ever-increasing subscriptions from the universities' libraries, -- for publishing research that the scholars there contributed for free. There has been a major boycott movement, in the sciences, against some of these megapublishers.
But this all sure does open for scammers to pretend they too are running real journals worthy of your article. And it has, big time -- so now we are all inundated now by a stream of solicitations -- because they want your 200 dollars. There is no way of stopping them other than blacklisting them as spam. It's the same as with any spam. You easily recognize them when they cook up a new fake email sending address each time they try to scam you again ... just like many other scammers and cheats will do, to get past your spam filter, if you have built one from blacklisting their previous attempts.
--What's missing so far, in all the debates over this, is a truly inspired study of the pretense on the part of the scammers, as compared with legit journals. Think about how the scammers try to mimic the manners of legit journals, in order to similarly make money from having a prestigious status. This means that studying the way the scammers try to fake it, also should shed light on how academic journals and publishers in general, the legit ones, work up their prestigious status, whether deserved or not. But as far as I know, no-one has made such a study -- yet.
yrs,
Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42 at cornell.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 22, 2016
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