Global Science Books: A Tale from the Cuckoo’s Nest. How Predatory Open Access Publishing Can Influence the Metrics of a Traditional Scholarly Publisher

Abstract

Based on the July, 2013 list published at scholarlyoa.com by Jeffrey Beall, the number of references by “predatory” open access (POA) journals or publishers was quantified in Global Science Books (GSB) journals. This is the first such ever attempt by any publisher or journal to complete such an analysis. Over an approximately 6-month period, a total of 189,904 references were examined in the reference lists of 2928 manuscripts published in any journal (extant or extinct, 31 in total) over a 7-year period (January 2007 to July 2013). The objective was to assess how unscholarly or predatory publishing can impact and/or influence another publisher and how the reference lists of the surrogate publisher can be used as an unsuspecting instrument (a surrogate deposit, the cuckoo’s nest) to spread and validate POA publishers and their journals.