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  • Predatory Publishing – What is a library’s role? An attempt at finding our place

    Predatory Publishing – What is a library’s role? An attempt at finding our place

    The community of practice ‘predatory publishing’ came together to write this blog post, providing insight into what we do and subsequent discussions, but by no means representing a general opinion or coming to a final conclusion. This post provides a shared perspective based on our experience working in the Austrian library system. Some of the…

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  • Beyond Predatory Publishing: Additional Questionable Offers in Scholarly Publishing

    Beyond Predatory Publishing: Additional Questionable Offers in Scholarly Publishing

    Besides predatory publishing, there are other practices in the area of scholarly publishing which are not about advancing science, but rather primarily intended to increase the authors’ output or impact in return for financial compensation. David Bimler terms this “publication facilitation”, which also includes dubious or hijacked journals because they offer dishonest researchers an opportunity…

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  • Predator & Prey – A Classic Role Allocation or a Symbiosis?

    Predator & Prey – A Classic Role Allocation or a Symbiosis?

    Duden, the unchallenged authority of the German language, defines the perpetrator as a person who commits or has committed an act, i.e. actively taken action. On the other hand, the victim is described as someone who suffers harm from someone/something, i.e. passively endures his harm. According to these definitions, the perpetrator and the victim are…

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  • How did we get here?

    How did we get here?

    Once, over at the Predatory Publishing blog, they tried to figure out what the first predatory journal was and they came up with the Journal of Biological Sciences, initially published in 2001. This means from the launch of the first open access journals to what is considered the first predatory journal, it took approximately 12…

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  • Predatory and other questionable practices in scholarly communication

    Predatory and other questionable practices in scholarly communication

    This blog post aims to explore the broad field of questionable practices and map the terrain, so to speak, that we are traversing in regards to the phenomenon of predatory publishing. First, we will discuss essential characteristics and concepts related to the phenomenon of predatory publishing. The second part of the paper explores the various…

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  • Scholarly Communications in Transition

    Scholarly Communications in Transition

    The Scholarly Communications in Transition blog originates from an Austrian project about predatory publishing that is embedded as part of a larger project titled Austrian Transition to Open Access (AT2OA2), which is now in its second term. Co-funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Research and by Austrian universities, AT2OA2 is a library-led project.…

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