Panel on Predatory Publishing

8^th September 2020
14.00 – 15.00 CEST (please check here for your timezone)

Chair: Elisa Giuliani

“Predatory journals are a global threat. They accept articles for publication — along with authors’ fees — without performing promised quality checks for issues such as plagiarism or ethical approval. Naive readers are not the only victims. Many researchers have been duped into submitting to predatory journals, in which their work can be overlooked. One study that focused on 46,000 researchers based in Italy found that about 5% of them published in such outlets” Nature Comment 11 December 2019.

How many times a week do you receive an email from an unknown publisher, who asks you to submit one of your papers to one of its journals, and who offers a quick and easy peer review process? Have you ever heard of predatory journals and what do you know about them? Should our community be more worried or be better informed about this new phenomenon? What has predatory publishing to do with open access? Should publications in predatory journals count in evaluating scholars’ careers and in research assessments?

These are amongst the key questions that this panel will seek to address. We welcome participants to raise more questions and share experiences.


Panel

Francesco Ciampi
Defining predatory journals: What counts is deceptiveness, not quality

Graziella Bertocchi  
Predatory journals, bibliometric analysis, and research evaluation

Mauro Sylos Labini  
‘Predatory’ journals and information asymmetries in scientific evaluations

Anna Severin  
Benefits and limitations of concepts for identifying predatory journals and legitimate journals (so-called “blacklists” and “whitelists”)


Speakers’ bio in alphabetical order

Graziella Bertocchi is Full Professor of Economics at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and President of the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance. She earned a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She has held positions at Brown University, New York University, Royal Holloway, Université Catholique de Louvain, European University Institute, and IGIER-Bocconi.

She is a Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and IZA. Her research interests include macroeconomics, political economy, comparative development, and the economics of growth, culture, and institutions. She is a member of the European Economic Association Standing Committee on Women in Economics (WinE) and she has been the Coordinator of the Evaluation Group for the Area of Economics and Statistics in the second Evaluation of the University System (ANVUR-VQR 2011-2014).


Francesco Ciampi is a Full Professor of Management at the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Florence. His research is mainly focused on innovation management, knowledge management, company strategy, organizational ambidexterity, default prediction modelling, management consulting, and small and medium-sized enterprises. He has authored and co-authored a number of papers that appeared in conferences, edited books and journals such as Small Business Economics, Journal of Business Research, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, The Journal of Technology Transfer, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Journal of Small Business Management, Management Decision, Journal of Knowledge Management, Journal of Intellectual Capital. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Intellectual Capital, member of the Board of Directors of the Italian Management Society and the Journal Rating Commission of the Italian Academy of Management. He has been teaching under-graduate courses in Management since 1995 and post-graduate courses in Management Consulting since 2004.


Anna Severin is a PhD Candidate at the University of Bern (CH) and a doctoral researcher at the Strategy Support Department of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Anna’s research revolves around the intersection of Open Access publishing and scientific quality control in scholarly publishing, with a focus on how the quality of peer review differs across different types of journals, including predatory journals and legitimate journals. Anna Severin holds a BA in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Bonn, an MRes in Sociology and Research Methods from the University of Glasgow and an MSc in Science and Technology Policy from the University of Sussex. Anna Severin is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University College London.


Mauro Sylos Labini is Professor of Economics at the University of Pisa. He received a PhD in Economics and Management from Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies and University of Strasbourg. His research focuses on the economics of science and innovation, gender economics, the economics of education. His research has been published in outlets such as Nature, the American Economic Review, Research Policy, and Labour Economics. 

Panel on Predatory Publishing