Humbug in the
Emerald City?
Selling the same
article over and over again...
A profitable innovation in
academic publishing;
Or how to bulk up a package at no cost
I noticed some time ago
that the two
most expensive journals in economics were extremely obscure,
not meeting the standards required to be searched by the ISI
Social Science Citation index,
and published
by an outfit called Emerald Publishing. See
The
P.T. Barnum
List. I wondered why any library would be so
profligate as to spend several thousand dollars a year on either of
these journals. I was told by
some librarians that they bought the paper subscriptions in order to be
able to get a
discounted price on a package that includes electronic
access to a very large
number of undistinguished journals in diverse areas. Hence
the package is difficult to evaluate.
Turns out I didn't know the half of it. Emerald had another trick
that would have delighted P.T. Barnum. Philip Davis, a
librarian at Cornell discovered that Emerald had been publishing the
same article in multiple journals, without telling
subscribers that they
were doing so. See the following links, describing the
results of Davis' investigations.
Duplication discovered
More duplication discovered.
Who is to blame?
Chronicle of Education Story
An Emerald editor defects
Professor Max Steuer, a respected economist, recently
resigned as
editor of Emerald's Journal of
Economic Studies after discovering Emerald's predatory policies.
Professor Steuer explains that:
"I resigned from editing the
Journal of Economic Studies on 6 January 2006. Shortly before
that date it was suggested to me
that the financial policy of the journal is inconsistent with the
culture and practices of the academic community. It was careless
of me not to look into this before taking on the job. I
simply assumed that the fees charged and other aspects of policy were
roughly in line with academic conventions. This turns out not to
be the case.
Click here for
full text of Steuer's letter.