A negative consequence of the rapid growth of scholarly open access publishing funded by article processing charges is the emergence of publishers and journals with highly questionable marketing and peer review practices. These so-called predatory publishers are causing unfounded negative publicity for open access publishing in general. Reports about this branch of e-business have so far mainly concentrated on exposing lacking peer review and scandals involving publishers and journals. There is a lack of comprehensive studies about several aspects of this phenomenon, including extent and regional distribution. After an initial scan of all predatory publishers and journals included in the so-called Beall’s list, a sample of 613 journals was constructed using a stratified sampling method from the total of over 11,000 journals identified. Information about the subject field, country of publisher, article processing charge and article volumes published between 2010 and 2014 were manually collected from the journal websites. For a subset of journals, individual articles were sampled in order to study the country affiliation of authors and the publication delays. Over the studied period, predatory journals have rapidly increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 active journals. Early on, publishers with more than 100 journals dominated the market, but since 2012 publishers in the 10–99 journal size category have captured the largest market share. The regional distribution of both the publisher’s country and authorship is highly skewed, in particular Asia and Africa contributed three quarters of authors. Authors paid an average article processing charge of 178 USD per article for articles typically published within 2 to 3 months of submission. Despite a total number of journals and publishing volumes comparable to respectable (indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals) open access journals, the problem of predatory open access seems highly contained to just a few countries, where the academic evaluation practices strongly favor international publication, but without further quality checks.

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'Predatory' open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics.

Many countries are pursuing innovation-led “smart” growth, which requires long-run strategic investments and public policies that aim to create and shape markets, rather than just “fixing” markets or systems. Market creation has characterized the kind of mission-oriented investments that led to putting a man on the moon and are currently galvanizing green innovation. Mission-oriented innovation has required public agencies to not only “de-risk” the private sector, but also to lead the direct creation of new technological opportunities and market landscapes. This paper considers four key issues that arise from a market-creating framework for policy: (1) decision-making on the direction of change; (2) the nature of (public and private) organizations that can welcome the underlying uncertainty and discovery process; (3) the evaluation of mission-oriented and market-creation policies; and (4) the ways in which both risks and rewards can be shared so that smart growth can also result in inclusive growth.

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From market fixing to market-creating: a new framework for innovation policy

Blood glucose levels are tightly controlled by the coordinated action of at least four cell types constituting pancreatic islets. Changes in the proportion and/or function of these cells are associated with genetic and molecular pathophysiology of monogenic, type 1, and type 2 (T2D) diabetes. Cellular heterogeneity impedes precise understanding of the molecular components of each islet cell type that govern islet (dys)function, particularly the less abundant delta and gamma/pancreatic polypeptide (PP) cells. Here, we report single-cell transcriptomes for 638 cells from nondiabetic (ND) and T2D human islet samples. Analyses of ND single-cell transcriptomes identified distinct alpha, beta, delta, and PP/gamma cell-type signatures. Genes linked to rare and common forms of islet dysfunction and diabetes were expressed in the delta and PP/gamma cell types. Moreover, this study revealed that delta cells specifically express receptors that receive and coordinate systemic cues from the leptin, ghrelin, and dopamine signaling pathways implicating them as integrators of central and peripheral metabolic signals into the pancreatic islet. Finally, single-cell transcriptome profiling revealed genes differentially regulated between T2D and ND alpha, beta, and delta cells that were undetectable in paired whole islet analyses. This study thus identifies fundamental cell-type-specific features of pancreatic islet (dys)function and provides a critical resource for comprehensive understanding of islet biology and diabetes pathogenesis.

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Single-cell transcriptomes identify human islet cell signatures and reveal cell-type-specific expression changes in type 2 diabetes.

STM publishing takes place within the broader system of scholarly communication, which includes both formal and informal elements. Scholarly communication plays different roles at different stages of the research cycle, and (like publishing) is undergoing technology-driven change. Categorising the modes of communication into one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many, and then into oral and written, provides a helpful framework for analysing the potential impacts of technology on scholarly communication ( The annual revenues generated from English-language science, technical and medical (STM) journal publishing are estimated at about $10 billion in 2013, (up from $8 billion in 2008), within a broader STM information publishing market worth some $25.2 billion. About 55% of global STM revenues (including non-journal STM products) come from the USA, 28% from Europe/Middle East, 14% from Asia/Pacific and 4% from the rest of the world. The USA continues to dominates the global output of research papers with a share of about 23% but the most dramatic growth has been in China and East Asia. China’s double-digit compound growth for more than 15 years led to its moving into second position, with 17% of global output. It is followed by the United Kingdom (7%), Germany (6%), Japan (6%), and France (4%). The rank order changes for citations, however, with the US strongly in the lead with 36% and China at 11th place with 6%.

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The STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing

An investigation of user attitudes toward search engines as an information retrieval tool

Purpose – Options to consider when reviewing Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) data suggest both advantages and disadvantages.Design/methodology/approach – This short piece suggests some issues to ponder that may not be the most advantageous. Opening up the door to perhaps some troubling concerns encourage one to pause and consider the available technologies and the role of the metadata.Findings – Earlier efforts to organize search output from online public access catalog searches retrieved items in reverse chronological order. Commercial indexing efforts were able to retrieve output in relevancy rankings based on search algorithms. This essay suggests that there are reasons for both and MARC contributes some particular nuances that complicate the potential for the most challenging searching.Originality value – Provides information of value to library professionals.

Repurposing MARC Data: Some Pitfalls

Purpose – This article aims to update an earlier article by the same author published in Library Hi Tech News in 2004 and analyses the failure of the Dublin Core metadata standard. Design/methodology/approach – The article is a commentary. Findings – The article finds that the Dublin Core metadata standard is moribund and that a newer, competing standard has rendered it essentially useless. Originality/value – The paper updates Dublin Core’s increasing obsolescence and will help librarians understand the standard’s rapid rise and slow fall.

Dublin Core is still dead

Open Access Week 2013: Protect your Patrons from Predatory Publishers

The paper lists and describes each of the twelve points of comparison used when comparing metadata schemes. The paper provides examples of some of the points of comparison and explains how to apply the points to individual schemes. Knowing the main points of comparison among the different metadata schemes available will be useful in selecting or evaluating a metadata scheme implementation. The paper will serve as a guide or checklist that will prove useful in comparing and evaluating metadata scheme implementation. Although individual points of comparison have been described in the literature, this is the first work that comprehensively describes all metadata schemes points of comparison in a single place.

Metadata Schemes Points of Comparison

Le catalogage derive presente l'inconvenient d'importer les erreurs typographiques originales. L'analyse des erreurs contenues dans les catalogues de bibliotheques et de leurs eventuelles corrections montre que le controle de la qualite dans le catalogage derive augmente les chances des utilisateurs de retrouver l'information desiree.

Jeffrey Beall

Papers

Repurposing MARC Data: Some Pitfalls

Dublin Core is still dead

Open Access Week 2013: Protect your Patrons from Predatory Publishers

Metadata Schemes Points of Comparison

How successful is copy cataloging at catching and fixing typographical errors in records imported from bibliographic utilities