OCLC, Inc., doing business as OCLC, is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing information costs". It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center, then became the Online Computer Library Center as it expanded. In 2017, the name was formally changed to OCLC, Inc. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog (OPAC) in the world. OCLC is funded mainly by the fees that libraries pay for the many different services it offers. OCLC also maintains the Dewey Decimal Classification system.
SciELO is a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals. SciELO was created to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countries and provides an efficient way to increase visibility and access to scientific literature. Originally established in Brazil in 1997, today there are 16 countries in the SciELO network and its journal collections: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
The National Union Catalog (NUC) is a printed catalog of books catalogued by the Library of Congress and other American and Canadian libraries, issued beginning in the 1950s. The National Union Catalog is divided into two series: the Pre-1956 Imprints is a 754-volume set containing all older records in a consolidated alphabetical format, while post-1955 volumes continue to be published serially. Since 1983, the NUC has been issued on microfiche. It is not related to the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC).
The Journal of Biological Sciences is a peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal covering research relating to general biology, biochemistry, genetics, and biotechnology. It was established in 2001 and is published by Science Alert on behalf of the Asian Network for Scientific Information. The publisher Science Alert has been designated as predatory by Jeffrey Beall. The editor-in-chief is Mehmet Ozaslan.
Hindawi is a commercial publisher of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. Founded in 1997, it currently publishes more than 230 peer-reviewed scientific journals as well as a number of scholarly monographs, with an annual output of roughly 20,000 articles each year. In 2021, Hindawi was purchased by John Wiley & Sons.
Nova Science Publishers is an academic publisher of books, encyclopedias, handbooks, e-books and journals, based in Hauppauge, New York. It was founded in 1985.
CSA was a division of Cambridge Information Group and provider of online databases, based in Bethesda, Maryland before merging with ProQuest of Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2007. CSA hosted databases of abstracts and developed taxonomic indexing of scholarly articles. These databases were hosted on the CSA Illumina platform and were available alongside add-on products like CSA Illustrata. The company produced numerous bibliographic databases in different fields of the arts and humanities, natural and social sciences, and technology. Thus, coverage included materials science, environmental sciences and pollution management, biological sciences, aquatic sciences and fisheries, biotechnology, engineering, computer science, sociology, linguistics, and other areas.
MDPI or Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute is a publisher of open access scientific journals. Founded by Shu-Kun Lin as a chemical sample archive, it has established over 200 broad-scope journals. MDPI is the largest open access publisher in the world and the fifth largest publisher overall in terms of journal paper output. The number of published papers has been growing significantly in the last decade with year over year growth of over 50% in 2017, 2018 and 2019.
Pulsus Group is a health informatics and digital marketing company and publisher of scientific, technical, and medical literature. It was formed in 1984, primarily to publish peer-reviewed medical journals. As of 2016, Pulsus published 49 hybrid and full open-access journals, 15 of which had been adopted as the official publications of related medical societies. Pulsus Group also conducts conferences in association with scientific societies.
World Journal of Gastroenterology is a weekly peer-reviewed open access medical journal that covers research in gastroenterology. It was established in 1995 and is published by Baishideng Publishing Group, which was included on Beall's list of predatory publishers. The editor-in-chief is Andrzej S. Tarnawski.
Frontiers in Bioscience is a peer reviewed scientific journal. It was established in 1996 and covers all biological and medical sciences. The editor-in-chief is Graham Pawelec. The journal consists of three sections: Landmark Edition, Scholar Edition, and Elite Edition
Bentham Science Publishers is a company that publishes scientific, technical, and medical journals and e-books. It publishes over 100 subscription-based academic journals and almost 40 open access journals. It is based in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, and has offices in the United States, Japan, China, India, and the Netherlands. As of 2021, 40 Bentham Science journals have received JCR impact factors, and they are a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics.
Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is a predatory academic publisher of open-access electronic journals, conference proceedings, and scientific anthologies that are considered to be of questionable quality. As of December 2014, it offered 244 English-language open-access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine.
OMICS Publishing Group is a predatory publisher of open access academic journals. It started publishing its first journal in 2008. By 2015, it claimed over 700 journals, although about half of them were defunct. Its subsidiaries include iMedPub LTD, Conference Series LLC LTD,SciTechnol, and Pulsus Group. Other organisations linked to OMICS are EuroSciCon Ltd, Allied Academies, Trade Science Inc, and Meetings International.
Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed open access scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by a group of neuroscientists, including Henry and Kamila Markram, and later expanded to other academic fields. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with other offices in London, Madrid, Seattle and Brussels. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).
Advanced Science Letters is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by American Scientific Publishers. The editor-in-chief is Hari Singh Nalwa. Publishing formats include full papers, short communications, and special sections consisting of various formats. The journal was established in June 2008, and is published by American Scientific Publishers, a company identified by Jeffrey Beall as a predatory publisher. Although the journal received a 2010 impact factor of 1.253, it ceased to be indexed the following year.
Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. The phenomenon of "open access predatory publishers" was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship.
Beall's List was a prominent list of predatory open-access publishers that was maintained by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall on his blog Scholarly Open Access. The list aimed to document open-access publishers who did not perform real peer review, effectively publishing any article as long as the authors pay the open access fee. Originally started as a personal endeavor in 2008, Beall's List became a widely followed piece of work by the mid-2010s. Its influence led some publishers on the list to threaten defamation lawsuits against Beall, as well as to lodge official complaints against Beall's work to the University of Colorado. In January 2017, Beall removed the list from his blog, scholarlyoa.com. Allegedly, Beall "was forced to shut down [his] blog due to threats and politics." However, Beall has not spoken publicly about his decision.
"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by Science correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake scientific papers to 304 journals owned by as many fee-charging open access publishers. The papers, writes Bohannon, "were designed with such grave and obvious scientific flaws that they should have been rejected immediately by editors and peer reviewers", but 60% of the journals accepted them. The article and associated data were published in the 4 October 2013 issue of Science as open access.
Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, best known for drawing attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and for creating what is now widely known as Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory open-access publishers. He is a critic of the open access publishing movement and particularly how predatory publishers use the open access concept, and is especially known for his blog Scholarly Open Access. He has also written on this topic in The Charleston Advisor, in Nature, in Learned Publishing, and elsewhere.
