MT4 and WT4 Detection of Questionable Publishing Practices: Procedures, Key Elements and Practical ExamplesCourse Chairs: Tom Olijhoek, PhD, Editor in Chief, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Netherlands
Instructor: Tom Olijhoek, PhD, Editor in Chief, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Netherlands;
Ivonne Lujano, DOAJ Ambassador for Latin America
Description: On Day 1 of the course, we will first explain in detail the criteria used by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) for assessment of good publishing practice in Open Access publishing. These criteria have been accepted as de facto standards for good publishing practice by many governments and organizations, including Science Europe.
We will have a practical session where participants evaluate journals using the DOAJ quality criteria. Criteria most important for the detection of questionable publishing practices will be discussed. Among these are peer review practices and how to check these, editorial board quality and article quality.
With the aid of figures and maps from the existing literature, we will highlight the geographical and numerical distribution of questionable publishing. We will also put the problem into perspective by providing evidence that questionable publishing is especially a problem in the Global South, and we will show that the overall problem is usually very much exaggerated in existing publications and reports on the subject.
n addition, we will show that the existing scholarly publishing system, inclusive of Open Access, is markedly biased in a kind of neocolonial way toward publishing research from the Global North. Policy makers in the Global South also tend to prefer publications in journals listed in Web of Science and Scopus (mostly from the North). All of this makes it difficult for scholars in the Global South to publish in local journals or to publish on local knowledge.
On Day 2, the course will offer a detailed look at properties of questionable publishing using practical examples from different regions of the world.
In a second practical session, participants will form groups and evaluate a number of suspicious journals with the aid of a checklist that we will provide. The findings will be discussed, and new detection criteria may emerge from this exercise.
The last part of the course will investigate, with the help of participants, how detection methods may be standardized and even partly automated with specific software implementations
