I recently noticed with great interest a call for papers on the JISC Knowledge Management Forum in regard to a forthcoming special issue of the journal Sustainability on the topic of “knowledge sharing and sustainable development.”
The role of knowledge management (KM) in sustainable development is a topic of considerable interest within the KM community, for example it was the focus of a significant recent MBRF webinar. Because of this interest, I was intending to widely promote the Sustainability call for papers, including posting the link into the Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) community.
But a subsequent post from Joern Fischer on the Ideas for Sustainability blog stopped me in my tracks. Fischer is Professor for Sustainable Land Use at the Institute for Ecology, Leuphana University Luneberg. In the introduction to his post, which is reproduced in full below, he states that “I would like to share my personal opinion why not to work with this journal, not as an author, and not as an editor.”
I was quite surprised by the post, given that Sustainability is indexed in Web of Science, which is described as “the world’s most trusted publisher-independent global citation database.” Because of this, the idea that Sustainability could be anything other than a reputable journal had never entered my thinking, and consistent with this, I have summarised KM articles from this journal here in RealKM Magazine.
The practices described below by Fischer – that is, bombarding academics with spam emails and accepting almost all submissions – sound more like the University Affairs description of a predatory journal than what would be expected from a high-quality academic publisher. However, this University Affairs article reveals that the publisher of Sustainability, the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), has been embroiled in a number of controversies including having previously been on Beall’s list of potential predatory scholarly open‑access publishers.
Although MDPI was removed from the list following a successful appeal, Beall remained critical of their approach, writing that “It is clear that MDPI sees peer review as merely a perfunctory step that publishers have to endure before publishing papers and accepting money from the authors.” Beall also implicates MDPI in his decision to shut down his list in 2017 following pressure from his university employer, stating that1 MDPI had “tried to be as annoying as possible to the university so that the officials would get so tired of the emails that they would silence me just to make them stop.”
In retrospect, I had missed a clear sign that MDPI was a potentially predatory publisher. The papers from Sustainability that I have summarised here in RealKM Magazine were KM papers published in a journal not with KM as a focus, but sustainability. Publishing articles not related to the journal focus is one of the characteristics of predatory journals identified in a 2017 study2.
While I still think that the papers from Sustainability that I have summarised here in RealKM Magazine are credible, I’ll certainly be thinking twice about using any further articles published by MDPI. I’ve already been doing this in regard to another publisher – IEEE – on the basis of a massive number of retractions and an unwillingness to disclose the reasons why.
You should do the same in regard to the call for papers for the forthcoming special issue of Sustainability on the topic of “knowledge sharing and sustainable development.” You should also consult our journal reviews series for information on KM journals that are worth your while.
Why not to publish in “Sustainability” (and you’re welcome to share this post)
By Joern Fischer
If you are a publishing academic in sustainability science, chances are high that you have been approached by the journal “Sustainability” to lead a special issue. With this blog post, I would like to share my personal opinion why not to work with this journal, not as an author, and not as an editor.
Sustainability is a journal that specialises in publishing special issues. To set up those special issues, it approaches authors of other recent papers, asking them if they might like to consider a special issue on a particular topic. For example, over the years, I have received invitations (among others) to contribute work for special issues on “Sustainability and Institutional Change”, “Landscape and Sustainability”, “Ecosystem Function and Land Use Change”, “Sustainable Landscape Management”, “Sustainable Futures”, “Integrated Landscape Governance for Food Security”, “Sustainable Multifunctional Landscapes” or “What is Sustainability? Examining Faux Sustainability”.
If you do accept to guest edit a special issue, you become one of now more than 1800 editorial board members (!). (I won’t link this to the journal’s website, but you can find that information easily on the journal website.) Hardly much of an achievement or distinction, given the predatory process with which the journal recruits people who are willing to run special issues.
That’s all not very uplifting, and many of us have known of this shady process for some time. But the situation appears to be getting worse, bordering on entirely non-sensical invitation emails.
One colleague of mine received the following statement:
“We recently invited you to serve as Guest Editor in Sustainability for the Special Issue “Sustainability Journal”. Please let us know whether or not you are interested, and if you have any further questions.“
Another person received this:
“Sustainability has launched a new position—Topic Editor.
Given your impressive expertise, we would like to invite you … The main responsibilities of Topic Editors are as follows:
- Promoting the journal during conferences (adding 1–2 slides into your presentation, distributing flyers, recommending the journal to your colleagues, etc.);
- Providing support for the Special Issues on topics related to your expertise or when the Guest Editor(s) is not available, including SI promotion via social media, pre-checking new submissions, making decisions, and giving advice on some scientific cases.
Benefits:
- We are glad to publish a paper of the Topic Editors with a special discount …“
Please take these excerpts as examples of the kinds of emails that come from this journal. YES, it’s easy to get stuff published there (I don’t know of anything ever having got rejected, in fact). YES, it has an impact factor. And YES, I’ve even co-authored one paper in this journal myself. But seriously, if we want to advance credible science on sustainability, then clearly not like this.
In case anyone from the Web of Science happens to be reading this blog: please review whether this journal and other similar ones really deserve an impact factor.
It is not my intention to say that all else is working well in the publishing business. I simply chose to share some basic facts and excerpts from recent emails by the journal, which for most of us, will make it self-evident that this is not a journal that ought to be supported in any way that might boost its credibility.
Header image source: Deposit Photos.
References:
- Beall, J. (2017). What I learned from predatory publishers. Biochemia medica, 27(2), 273-278. ↩
- Shamseer, L., Moher, D., Maduekwe, O., Turner, L., Barbour, V., Burch, R., … & Shea, B. J. (2017). Potential predatory and legitimate biomedical journals: can you tell the difference? A cross-sectional comparison. BMC medicine, 15(1), 28. ↩
Also published on Medium.
