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More recently, Beall redoubled his attack by publishing an incompetent general critique of MDPI. As someone forwarded an advance copy of Beall's post to MDPI, we have asked Beall to communicate with us before publishing his critique. Beall did not react. Beall has become known as the maintainer of a list of questionable open access journals. However, in December 2013 he expressed personal views highly critical of open access in general in a piece published in the open access journal TripleC. Beall’s allegations against MDPI include:
Beall bases his questionable writing on a “report” that was published by Dr. Xin Ge. Dr. Ge has been harassing MDPI and its academic editors for several weeks, as MDPI twice sponsored a prize against academic fraud in China, which is awarded annually since 2012 by Dr. Shi-min Fang, see our statement http://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/502/. The “report” is one of many open letters from Dr. Ge to Nature, after Nature co-sponsored the 2012 John Maddox Prize, which was jointly awarded to Dr. Shi-min Fang and Professor Sir Simon Wessely. Dr. Ge’s “open letters” have all been ignored by Nature. Open access publishing is just one of the publishing models and it should maintain the same professional standard as advocated by societies such as COPE, STM and OASPA. MDPI strives to fulfill the high standard of publication ethics. We believe that open access has a significant advantage over other models of publishing: the scientific community can easily access the literature and make scholarly comments on the papers. Serious critique of any paper published in our journals is very welcome and should be addressed to the editors of the journal. Discussions, criticism and proposal to help to improve other aspects of open access publishing service are also appreciated. We wish to conclude by expressing that Beall’s blacklist in its current form is unnecessary and unreliable. On the one hand, there are professional indexing databases operating as watchdogs of journal quality. Professional databases such as the Web of Science, Scopus or PubMed can be used as whitelists of good journals. Also, professional services and societies, such as the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), are putting in a great deal of effort to distinguish reputable open access journals and their publishers from scamming activities. On the other hand, Mr. Beall operates as an individual person and does not provide sufficient evidence for his claims, does not attempt to verify his statements for accuracy, nor operate a methodological approach to his appraisals. Beall also denies the right to defense to those that he attacks. Beall’s judgments are therefore to be considered as unreliable, unmethodical and his personal opinions. Notes Beall’s
anti-open access comments can be accessed from the website of the journal TripleC: Beall
published a paper in the MDPI journal Future
Internet in 2009: A
chemist’s blog criticizing Beall’s attack: The
news story on eCampus News: This article originally posted on http://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/534 Posted by Friends of Open Access |
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