Journal blacklists are a useful way to promote academic integrity

In his recent commentary in Times Higher Education, Emanuel Kulczycki argues against creating “blacklists” of predatory journals. He refers to the recent addition of more than 400 MDPI journals to the predatoryreports.org database (a successor to Beall’s famous blacklist) and notes the subsequent delisting from Clarivate’s Web of Science platform of some major journals published by MDPI and fellow open-access publisher Hindawi – but also by Routledge, Sage and Taylor & Francis. He does not mention another significant event, the resignation of Gemma Derrick as editor-in-chief of the MDPI journal Publications on the grounds that the “backstage practice of key values at MDPI are increasingly at odds with the values we prioritise in publication practices”.

Kulczycki argues against naming and shaming predatory journals because, according to him, “creating such lists doesn’t promote integrity or trust in science”. He uses all the standard arguments that blur the line between traditional and predatory publishing: not all papers published by predatory journals are bad, the papers get cited and, even if their review process is problematic, traditional journals struggle with maintaining the quality of their review process as well.

“For many researchers, publishing in MDPI journals is a smart decision because these publications ‘count’ towards their workplace’s goals and might receive recognition and rewards,” Kulczycki writes. But he does not mention that the same rewards can be “earned” by publishing in traditional journals, except that it is much harder and the outcome of a submission to such journals is uncertain. In my opinion, this highlights the key difference between predatory and traditional journals: the former build their business model on encouraging opportunism, which has long-term consequences for the research community.

Coming from the same system as Kulczycki – Poland – I too have witnessed the national research evaluation exercise of higher education institutions being hijacked by the opportunistic researchers and departments that spend an enormous amount of public money on publications in predatory journals (many of which are included on a ministerial “whitelist” of legitimate journals). As a result, in many disciplines, the winners – who will get the most funding – are departments that have fairly low research capacity, leaving better ones, which adhere to the traditional publishing model, out in the cold.

This means that in Poland’s woefully underfunded research environment, in which grant success rates are currently between 5 and 10 per cent, public funds were misdirected first to pay for predatory publications, then to pay the rewards to scholars who collected the most “points” for these publications, and finally to increase funding to their departments.

Kulczycki says it is understandable that people are taking advantage of the system, but I find that hard to accept. In my opinion the current situation is more the product of researchers’ opportunism than the limitations of journal whitelists.

A few weeks ago, I convinced my two co-authors that we should withdraw our paper from review in one of the open-access “megajournals” because it came to my attention that this journal operates on the exact same basis as predatory journals on the predatoryreports.org blacklist. What we did, I believe, was strategic, but not opportunistic. We are still waiting for the reviews from the traditional journal to which we subsequently submitted, but at least we will not have to excuse ourselves for our choice of publishing outlet a few years from now. Had that megajournal been on a blacklist, we would never have thought about submitting to it in the first place.

Academia these days is regularly rocked by integrity-related scandals, from large-scale apparent research misconduct to discoveries of paper mills, mass self-citation practices and even the buying and selling of citations. But you could use all of Kulczycki’s arguments to claim that the whistleblowing and investigations that led to these discoveries were unnecessary; after all, these were not all bad papers – they got cited and people even made careers on them.

These examples show why Kulczycki’s argument is wrong. Blacklists of predatory journals, like all other bottom-up initiatives that promote quality and integrity, are a demonstration of vigilance and self-policing capacity that the research community really needs. They also provide information that researchers might not otherwise come across, on the basis of which they can make publication decisions and be held accountable for them.

Nor do I subscribe to the argument that researchers in more peripheral countries cannot be expected to produce the research quality necessary to publish in traditional journals. This is both patronising and untrue. Many researchers in peripheral countries do world-class research and publish their results really well. Unfortunately, many of them are being increasingly marginalised by their publication choices.

Kulczycki calls predatory journals “mislocated centres of scholarly communication” and correctly points out that their popularity in a particular country is a function of that country’s distance from the centre of the academic world. For me, though, this is yet another argument in support of blacklists. By not naming predatory practices, we accept the system that abuses less economically developed countries to sell them the illusion of visibility and impact.

Natalia Letki is an associate professor at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies and the Centre of Excellence in Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw.