Simon Linacre Academic Publishing

Agile thinking

In early November, Cabells is very pleased to be supporting the Global Business School Network (GBSN) at its annual conference in Lisbon, Portugal. In looking forward to the event, Simon Linacre looks at its theme of ‘Measuring the Impact of Business Schools’, and what this means for the development of scholarly communications.

For those of you not familiar with the Global Business School Network, they have been working with business schools, industry and charitable organizations in the developing world for many years, with the aim of enhancing access to high quality, highly relevant management education. As such, they are now a global player in developing international networking, knowledge-sharing and collaboration in wider business education communities.

Cabells will support their Annual Conference in November in its position as a leader in publishing analytics, and will host a workshop on ‘Research Impact for the Developing World’. This session will focus on the nature of management research itself – whether it should focus on global challenges rather than just business ones, and whether it can be measured effectively by traditional metrics, or if new ones can be introduced. The thinking is that unless the business school community is more pro-active about research and publishing models themselves, wider social goals will not be met and an opportunity lost to set the agenda globally.

GBSN and its members play a pivotal role here, both in seeking to take a lead on a new research agenda and also in seizing an opportunity to be at the forefront of what relevant research looks like and how it can be incentivized and rewarded. With the advent of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – a “universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity” – not only is there an increased push to change the dynamics of what prioritizes research, there comes with it a need to assess that research in different terms. This question will form the nub many of the discussions in Lisbon in November.

So, what kind of new measures could be applied? Well firstly, this does assume that measures can be applied in the first place, and there are many people who think that any kind of measurement is unhelpful and unworkable. However, academic systems are based around reward and recognition, so to a greater or lesser degree, it is difficult to see measures disappearing completely. Responsible use of such measures is key, as is the informed use of a number of data points available – this is why Cabells includes unique data such as time to publication, acceptance rates, and its own Cabells Classification Index© (CCI©) which measures journal performance using citation data within subject areas.

In a new research environment, just as important will be new measures such as Altmetrics, which Cabells also includes in its data. Altmetrics can help express the level of online engagement research publications have had, and there is a feeling that this research communications space will become much bigger and more varied as scholars and institutions alike seek new ways to disseminate research information. This is one of the most exciting areas of development in research at the moment, and it will be fascinating to see what ideas GBSN and its members can come up with at their Annual Conference.

If you would like to attend the GBSN Annual Conference, Early Bird Registration is open until the 15th September.

Mike Bisaccio Predatory publishing

FTC v. OMICS: a landmark predatory publishing case

In March of 2019, upon review of numerous allegations of predatory practices against the publisher OMICS International, the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada ordered OMICS to pay $50.1 million in damages. The case marks one of the first judgments against a publisher accused of predatory practices and could be a signal of greater publisher oversight to come.

In March of this year, a US federal court ordered OMICS International to pay over $50 million in damages stemming from a 2016 lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the first such action against a ‘predatory’ publisher.  The FTC was moved to act against the Hyderabad, India-based open access publisher and its owner, Srinubabu Gedela, after receiving a multitude of complaints from researchers concerning several systematic fraudulent practices.

In April we wondered if this decision would be more than a public record and condemnation of OMICS’ practices, but also act as a deterrent to other similar operations. Stewart Manley, a lecturer for the Faculty of Law at the University of Malaya, has gone deeper in examining this topic in two recent articles: “On the limitations of recent lawsuits against Sci‐Hub, OMICS, ResearchGate, and Georgia State University” (subscription required) featured in the current issue of Learned Publishing, and “Predatory Journals on Trial: Allegations, Responses, and Lessons for Scholarly Publishing from FTC v. OMICS” from the April issue of Journal of Scholarly Publishing (subscription required).

Mr. Manley was also recently interviewed for Scholastica’s blog where he addressed several key questions on this topic and felt that other questionable publishers will likely not be deterred if OMICS wins on appeal or simply refuses to comply with the order. He also lays out the key takeaways from FTC v. OMICS for publishers, academics, and universities.

Another recent article, “OMICS, Publisher of Fake Journals, Makes Cosmetic Changes to Evade Detection” by Dinesh C. Sharma for India Science Wire discusses a recent study showing the evolution of OMICS journals to mimic legitimate journals, making it difficult to distinguish between authentic and fake journals using the standard criteria. Rather than make substantive changes to their practices, OMICS is finding ways to more effectively evade quality checks.

Despite the hits OMICS has taken in actual court and in the court of public opinion, with an appeal in the offing, the final outcome of this matter is still to be determined. Additionally, as Mr. Manley points out in his Q&A, enforcing a judgment such as this is difficult, especially when the defendant is from a foreign jurisdiction. OMICS has yet to comply with the order and there is little reason to believe they ever will. We will continue to monitor this case and will provide updates as they become available.