Page 5 - IDEA Studie 16 2016 Predatorske casopisy ve Scopusu

Study 16 / 2016
Predatory Journals in Scopus2 NOVEMBER 2016
VÍT MACHÁČEK and MARTIN SRHOLEC
Summary
 The study maps the penetration of so-called “predatory” scholarly journals into the citation database Scopus. Predatory journals exploit the author pays open access model, and conduct only cursory or no peer review, despite claims to the contrary. Some such journals will publish almost anything for money. In theCzech context whether a journal is indexed in Scopus is crucial for determining the points that publications in that journal are awarded in the national performance-based evaluation of research organizations, which in turn is the basis for the allocation of institutional funding. Hence, in this evaluation framework, publishing in predatory journals that are indexed in Scopus has a clear “fiscal” advantage.
 Our analysis is based on a survey of “potential, possible, or probable” predatory journals by Jeffrey Beall at the University of Colorado. He maintains a blog with two regularly updated lists: i) a list of standalone journals, which contains individual predatory journals; and ii) a list of publishers, which implicates questionable publishing houses, usually with multiple journals. Beall’s lists suffer from their own limitations but are – in our view – representative enough of the overall problem of predatory publishing.
 Using the Ulrichsweb register we compiled a comprehensive database of the journals that Jeffrey Beall considers predatory. The database covers both standalone journals, the names of which are easily obtained directly from Beall’s first list, as well as the journals issued by predatory publishers implicated in Beall’s second list. We then searched Scopus using the ISSN of each predatory
2 This study received support from the research programme Strategy AV21 of the Czech Academy of Sciences. We would like to thank Daniel Münich for his precious comments. Any inaccuracies, omissions or errors are however down to the autohors.
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