“The Predator Effect – Fraud in the Scholarly Publishing Industry: An Interview with Simon Linacre”

From The Scholarly Kitchen:

Today Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe interviews Simon Linacre, author of the recently published book, The Predator Effect: Understanding the Past, Present and Future of Deceptive Academic Journals, and Head of Content, Brand & Press at Digital Science.

Here’s One Exchange From the Interview (Complete Interview Runs 1505 Words):

How can a legitimate open access journal, particularly a new start-up that is independent of any of the long-established publishers, demonstrate that it isn’t predatory? 

You’ll notice I have used the term ‘validated’ rather than ‘peer reviewed’, and that’s because we now have several emerging forms of scholarly content that have been validated in different ways than the traditional peer review process. (I say traditional, but peer review itself only became mainstream in the post-war period, so validation itself is perhaps more fluid than people realize.) For a new OA journal, the editors and publishers may decide to adopt peer review and validate it in various ways — by reporting on this process transparently, or by implementing open peer review, or by adopting a post-publication peer review like the F1000 model. I am a Trustee of COPE, and we deal all the time with cases where authors try to subvert systems, and one result of this is that systems offer increasingly better ways for legitimate publishing to flourish in the constant fight against bad actors. So for a new OA journal, I do think there has never been a better time to launch with the support there is for legitimate publishing processes.

Direct to Complete Interview

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Interviews, News, Open Access, Profiles, Publishing