Page 6 - IDEA Studie 6 2017 Pod poklickou Beallovych seznamu

of publishers contains two important entries, namely Frontiers and Impact Journals, the accusation of which being predatory appears to be questionable. Relatively high citation impact scores coupled with large shares of authors from advanced countries injournals under these publishing houses vindicates the controversy. Jeffrey Beall in these verdicts challenges opinion of hundreds if not thousands researchers worldwide, who apparently read and quite frequently cite results reported in these journals.
 Scopus indexes roughly by one half more journals in general than the Web of Science, but contains ten times more journals suspected of predatory practices; hence it is far more affected by this problem. Scopus’s criteria for indexing journals as well as for re- evaluation of low-performing journals appear fairly complex on paper. However, this filter does not seem to stop predatory journals from infiltrating the database in practice. In fact, Scopus continues to index a number of journals, the predatory accusation of which appears to be credible. Yet the Web of Science is not completely immune either, including to penetration of the most suspicious journals. Indeed, indexing in citations databases, even the most respected ones, cannot be used to determine whether a journal is predatory or not. The new „green tick“ of the Directory of Open-Access Journals seems promising, but for a final call on this one we need to wait for the re-evaluation process of all enlisted journals to be completed and for the new entry criteria to stand the test of time.
 Revision of results of the previous IDEA study with the benefit of hindsight of these findings does not bring good news for the Czech Republic and Slovakia. If journals under the publishing houses of Frontiers and Impact Journals are eliminated from the list of predators, the share of documents published in predatory journals in the total citable documents in Scopus does not change much in the Czech Republic and Slovakia but drops substantially in most other OECD countries. More specifically, roughly in two thirds of OECD countries more than half of the documents previously labelled as predatory came out in journals under these two publishers, whereas in the Czech Republic this was only one fifth and in Slovakia merely one tenth. After deducting documents in these journals from the pool of predatory results the propensity to publish in predators in the Czech Republic and Slovakia appears far higher in comparison to the less affected countries than envisaged previously. It should be noted that the revised figures change results for OECD countries; however, the main conclusions with regards to global differences remain intact.
 Predatory publishing can be tackled in many ways. Citation databases should start evaluating how journals conduct peer review in practice, not only what they claim to do on paper, and raise again the bar of selection criteria for indexing up to a level that predators cannot jump over. Respectable journals would hit the business of predatory publishing hard by collectively embracing the principles of open peer review, as the fraudulent journals that fake peer review have nothing to show. Systems of research evaluation should not resort to the simple solution of blindly relying on white lists of relevant journals, but look at the actual content of the evaluated research. Research funders always have the option to jump over the publishers by establishing their own open-access platforms. Research organizations should explicitly forbid predatory publishing in their code of ethics and banish researchers that intentionally breach the rules. Academics should think twice before paying author fees for publication in an open-access journal that did not provide proper peer review, as a personal profile full of predatory publications can easily turn out to be a liability rather than an assess later in their careers.
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