Last summer, I worked with NESCent and Google’s Summer of Code to write a small piece of software. I think it’s quite useful for the specific thing it does and some researchers in my immediate peer group who have used it agree. I wrote up a short manuscript describing the program and very quickly got it rejected from Molecular Ecology Resources and Bioinformatics. It went on the back burner for several months until I got a solicitation from a new open-access journal that was offering a discounted rate for articles received before a certain date. So I submitted to this journal, after looking up some of their papers and a few people that have published there and convincing myself it wasn’t a flat-out scam.
One day after I submitted, I got an email asking me to review my own article. I know, right? How could that ever happen with a legitimate journal? I declined, they sent it to others to review and about a month later I got three reviews back that were short (0.5 – 1 page), but addressed real questions about my manuscript and included helpful suggestions. I incorporated the changes as best I could and resubmitted. About a week after the resubmission, I saw Beall’s List of Predatory Open-Access Publishers, which includes the aforementioned journal on the list of “questionable, scholarly open-access publishers”. The author of the list says: I recommend that scholars not do any business with these publishers, including submitting articles, serving as editors or on editorial boards, or advertising with them. Also, articles published in these publishers’ journals should be given extra scrutiny in the process of evaluation for tenure and promotion.
Then, this morning, I got final acceptance of the manuscript and I’m not sure what to do.
I’m not trying to pull one over on anyone and I don’t necessarily disagree with the above text, but I don’t think this paper will be able to go anywhere else and I’m not convinced this journal is Bad. Not a lot of places publish small pieces of discipline-specific software (if you know of any, let me know). I believe this would be a really useful tool for somebiologists and in fact, there are a couple of people waiting to cite the manuscript. I don’t want to encourage predatory journals, but open-access articles that do not-super-important science might actually have a place in our field.
I would LOVE thoughts on this. I certainly don’t view this manuscript as equivalent to a Molecular Ecology or Evolution publication – but do all pubs have to be top (or middle) tier? Is there a solution here, like including impact factors on CVs? Or maybe new fangled software like Google Citations can alleviate this problem since they show the overall publishing record of an individual/article? Please weigh in!