Signs of divisiveness, discrimination and stigmatization caused by Jeffrey Beall's “predatory” open access publishing blacklists and philosophy

作者：J. A. Teixeira da Silva, Stephen Gichuhi Kimotho · 发表于：The journal of academic librarianship · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102418 · 被引用次数：28 · 研究领域：Sociology

Abstract Jeffrey Beall, a US librarian, coined the term “predatory publishing” specifically to describe a movement or phenomenon of open access (OA) journals and publishers that he and others believed displayed exploitative and unscholarly principles. Using a blog to transmit those ideas, and profiling specific cases using blacklists, one of the most polemic aspects of Beall's blog was its tendency to attract and incite academic radicalism. Beall targeted both publishers and standalone journals, but how he precisely determined that an OA journal or a publisher was predatory was in many cases an ambiguity. Beall's deficient and highly subjective criteria, as well as those blacklists' incapacity to clearly distinguish low quality OA publishers from predatory ones, may have negatively impacted the operations of several Beall-blacklisted OA journals and publishers. Freedom of speech that embraces prejudice, via Beall's blog, and the establishment of “predatory” blacklists, are enhanced discriminatory ideologies that continue to be carried downstream from Beall to and by other like-minded individuals and groups who proliferate academic divisiveness and may also be formalizing and institutionalizing a culture of discriminative philosophies by cloning Beall's blacklists and encouraging their continued use.