PREDATORY PUBLISHING AND BEALL’S LIST: LESSONS FOR THE COUNTRIES ADAPTING NOVEL RESEARCH EVALUATION CRITERIA

Academic publishing is important both for academics and research and educational institutions, since it plays a significant role in institutional evaluation and rankings. In most countries, the desirable academic output represents publications in journals indexed in Scopus and Web of Science databases. However, even some of these journals were included in the so-called “Beall's List”, a blog that claimed to feature the list of open-access “predatory” journals (i.e. journals publishing scientific nonsense for money). Czech Republic was one of the Eastern European countries that was severely affected by this phenomenon. According to some estimates, between 2009 and 2013 many Czech universities and research institutions made about 2 million USD on payments from the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport for the papers and monographs published by the “predatory” publishers. Even though Scopus and Web of Science remain the main criterion for journals selection in the Czech Republic, some critics try to undermine the prestige of these databases. However, it become obvious that drifting away from Scopus and Web of Sciencein order to create local publication standards might lead to a situation in which a small group of local academics would make decisions on which articles (and which journals) are good and which are bad, and therefore control academic careers and job promotions for their own benefit.