PROTECT YOUR PATRONS FROM PREDATORY PUBLISHERS

Date: Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Time: 3:30-4:30 pm EDT

Speaker: Jeffrey Beall, University of Colorado-Denver

Cost: Free

Registration deadline: None, but slots are limited to 100. Therefore, we ask if possible to have group viewings at your local institution.

To celebrate Open Access Week in 2013, Scholar Commons and ResearchOne at the University of South Florida together with NASIG (the North American Serials Interest Group), have teamed up to present this free webinar. This webinar will provide an overview of the issues related to scholarly open-access publishing of importance to academic librarians, focusing on the unintended consequences such as predatory publishers and their abuse of the gold open-access model.

Emerging scholarly publishing models are changing the culture of scholarly communication. One of these new models, gold open access, provides free, universal access to scholarly literature. However, this model, financed by article processing charges paid for by authors or their funders, has become largely corrupted. Numerous unscrupulous or “predatory” publishers using the gold open-access model have appeared, poisoning scholarly communication by accepting papers just to earn the author fees. The implications of this corruption for researchers are many. Greater scrutiny is required by all involved in scholarly communication from authors, to reviewers, editors, and even tenure and promotion committees. This talk will explain how scholars and academic librarians can identify predatory publishers. A particular journal’s inclusion in a library database doesn’t always mean it is legitimate. This webinar will provide an overview of the issues related to scholarly open-access publishing of importance to academic librarians, focusing on the unintended consequences such as predatory publishers and their abuse of the gold open-access mode.

Speaker Background:

As an academic librarian for 22 years, currently at the Auraria Library for the University of Colorado-Denver, Jeffrey Beall has extensively published in the areas of metadata, searching, and retrieval. With his interest in open access publishing beginning in 2009, his experiences, research, and writings since have led him to publish a list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals. He encourages all scholars to increase scrutiny of publishers of their research.