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

The Dublin Core Metadata Standard was conceived illegitimately, had a troubled life, and has finally met its demise. Developed as a tool for online resource discovery, the standard waned after the arrival of Google. Because its fields were designed with a lack of specificity, Dublin Core suffered from nonstandard data elements and poor interoperability. Also, the poor organization behind the initiative contributed to its failure. Dublin Core will likely soon be replaced by an emerging standard, the Metadata Object Description Schema.

Dublin Core: An Obituary

Scientific Soundness and the Problem of Predatory Journals

IntroductionThe scholarly publishing industry has witnessed the appearance of numerous scholarly, open- access publishers, an innovation that has made many thousands and even millions of scholarly articles available for free over the Internet. The open- access movement has benefitted from the goodwill of countless authors, organizations, funding agencies, and open- access repositories. Unfortunately, as with any large- scale innovation, there has emerged a cadre of racketeers, distributed worldwide, who seek to exploit the open- access (OA) model for their own financial gain. These unscrupulous publishers abuse the authorpays model of open access publishing only for their own profit, engaging in dishonest, deceptive, and unethical practices, and mocking the goodwill of those who promote scholarly, open- access publishing. This article identifies and examines unethical practices in scholarly, open- access publishing, limiting its focus to those publishers employing the gold "author- pays" model.Etiology of the Unethical PracticesOne of the sources of the current problem is the common belief or assumption that all open- access publishing is meritorious, benevolent, and wellintentioned, a belief promoted by librarians and others backing the open- access movement. Many academic librarians blindly and comprehensively promote scholarly, open- access publishing, which means they are partially promoting publishers committing unethical practices.The nature of gold open- access publishing means that those who promote the model must qualify their recommendations. In the traditional scholarly publication model, the market served to prevent or eliminate publishers that engaged in unethical practices; that market control is non- existent in the openaccess model, especially given the minimal startup barriers and low operating costs of open- access publishing. For example, no library would pay for a journal known to be bogus, but bogus journals that are free are unbounded by the startup cost barrier. And because predatory publishers are masters of deception, it is easy for them to fool submitting authors into thinking they are legitimate. Moreover, in the online environment it is especially easy for an unethical publisher to appear legitimate. Also, the very nature of the author- pays model is a conflict of interest; the more articles a gold OA publisher accepts, the more money it earns.Reading a bibliography, vita, or list of published works, it is hard to identify journals from unethical publishers. The titles they use mimic those of legitimate journals and begin with phrases such as "International Journal of...." This sideby- side placement of both legitimate and illegitimate journals is a loss, for no longer can one assume that an unfamiliar but legitimate sounding journal is in fact legitimate; further investigation is required, creating new burdens for those engaged in the evaluation of scholarly activities or in judging research grant applications.Other StudiesThe problem of fraudulent open- access publishers is a relatively new one, and few authors have covered it. The review journal The Charleston Advisor has published several of this writer's reviews of these publishers. In 2009, it pub - lished this writer's review of Bentham Open (Beall, 2009). In 2010, the journal published a collective review of nine publishers, and it is in this review that this author coined the term "predatory open- access publishers." "We use the term 'predatory' cautiously, primarily in an attempt to initially categorize a certain class of Open- Access, scholarly publishers with like characteristics" (Beall, 2010a, pp. 14-15). A later update to this article examined three additional publishers this author identified as predatory (Beall, 2010b). Writing in 2011, this author reviewed the Texas- based publisher Internet Scientific Publications (Beall, 2011).The 2010 version of the International Mathematical Union's Best Current Practices for Journals (2011) alludes to predatory publishers, saying, "The proliferation of poorly run mathematical journals is becoming an increasing burden to the community. …

Unethical Practices in Scholarly, Open-Access Publishing

Avoiding the Peril of Publishing Qualitative Scholarship in Predatory Journals.

This review critically examines five international scholarly publishers that publish academic journals using the gold (author pays) Open Access model. The author-pays model is changing scholarly publishing because authors, rather than libraries or other subscribers, become the publishers' customers, an arrangement that creates a built in conflict of interest. The more articles a publisher accepts, the more revenue it earns. New gold Open Access publishers are appearing almost weekly, and many are engaged in unethical practices. The review covers four predatory publishers, Academy Publish, BioInfo, ScienceDomain International, and Scientific Research Publishing, and one legitimate publisher, AOSIS Open Journals.

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Jeffrey Beall

Papers

Dublin Core: An Obituary

Scientific Soundness and the Problem of Predatory Journals

Unethical Practices in Scholarly, Open-Access Publishing

Avoiding the Peril of Publishing Qualitative Scholarship in Predatory Journals.

Five Scholarly Open Access Publishers