Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: In recent years, the number of journals that publish articles without considering their scientific merit, but simply because the author has paid a fee, has expanded dramatically. The scientific community refers to these journals as predatory journals. Various lists of predatory journals exist, such as the Beall's List (https://beallslist.net/), and it is generally accepted that there are several thousand such publications. This suggests that a predatory publishing industry now exists. We regard predatory journals as problematic because of the ways in which they manipulate researchers, in particular, young and unexperienced ones (Xia et al., 2015). In return for a fee, which may be quite substantial, these journals accept research without peer review, valuing their profit over scholarship or any attempt to generate valid knowledge transparently. Nevertheless, the business model works, in large part because these journals meet an urgent and unfulfilled need: to get research published in journals. Because non-predatory journals are unable or unwilling to accept more than a small fraction of the vast numbers of research papers being written, the predatory journal industry has a guaranteed supply of willing authors. These authors argue quite reasonably that they must, somehow, publish their papers within a necessarily limited period to hold on to their jobs. As editors, we often receive entreating emails from authors who ask how much they need to pay to get their article accepted, pointing out that if they do not get it published, they will lose their jobs. Agencies also intermediate this process, offering us large numbers of papers for publication, with payment (to our personal bank accounts) of substantial fees if we can waive the review process and guarantee publication in the next issue. In this editorial, we discuss this challenge and reflect on ways in which the information systems research community can deal with it. Predatory journals target all researchers. It is quite common that shortly after a reputable journal has accepted your article, you will get an email that praises you to the skies and invites you to submit more of your excellent work to Journal X, for publication in the next issue. Fees are generally not mentioned at this stage. Authors who are not in the position of just having had a paper accepted may also find that their contact details have been harvested and so they too are on the receiving end of these seductive invitations. Young and aspiring researchers who are under enormous pressure to establish a record of published research are particularly vulnerable. With an increasing focus on quantifiable and measurable achievements to reach and retain academic promotions, predatory journals may for them be the only option. Their supervisors or senior colleagues will also be burdened to evaluate outlets they know little about and give the right advice. The pressure on authors created by reputable journals to produce high-quality research plays a vital role in promoting state-of-the-art research activities within a research field and acts as a singular motivation for scholars. However, the increasing focus on counting the number of publications, as well as the associated h-index, may influence scholarship negatively (cf. Davison & Bjørn-Andersen, 2019). Not only may researchers feel that the quick publication of research demonstrates productivity and that this is inherently a good thing, but also they may choose not to develop more long term and significant research contributions. If numbers are all that matters, other questionable and unhealthy behaviours may emerge, for example, the tendency to publish in predatory journals if reputable journals are out of reach. We note that as of December 2019, the AIS has over 4,800 members. Much as the AIS might like otherwise, not all IS academics are members: indeed, many join only because they need to attend an AIS conference. Thus, the total number of IS academics is probably closer to 7000, a figure estimated by King and Galletta (2010). Presumably all of these people need to publish, ideally at least one paper per year. Many of us publish several or more papers per year. In contrast, in 2019 the AIS Basket of Eight journals published a total of 340 articles. There are numerous reputable journals to publish in other than the AIS Basket journals, yet 340 articles represent only a small percentage of the number that would be required if all IS academics were to publish one article in the AIS Basket each year, even allowing for multiple authors on a single paper. We suppose that a combination of carrots and sticks may be needed to address the predatory journal problem. Fundamentally, the information systems research community must develop and agree on a definition of predatory journals, perhaps taking inspiration from initiatives such as Grudniewicz et al. (2019, p. 211): ‘Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices’. As a community, we can also work towards ‘white lists’ of reputable journals with documented quality and transparency, which is less cumbersome and risky than ‘black lists’ of predatory journals. Several such lists are already in place. One example is the consortium-based Sherpa database maintained by the University of Nottingham (www.sherpa.ac.uk) showing the compliance of open access journals related to funding, embargo periods and so on. Another example is from the Nordic countries, which have assessed and classified more than 30 000 peer-reviewed journals. Around 70 committees update these lists annually, classify journals as tier 1 and tier 2 (see eg, https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/Forside). National information systems associations or the AIS can validate such lists and ensure that they are globally valid. These lists must be regularly maintained if they are to be comprehensive and should include information about publication fees, acceptance rates and so on. Department heads and university administrators must also be engaged to ensure that research quality is valued over the number of publications. We must ask whether appointment, promotion and tenure committees actually read the articles submitted, or do they just note that a certain number of articles have been accepted in certain journals, perhaps using the journal ranking or reputation as a proxy for the quality of the article itself? Further, we could work towards the norm that scholars who publish in predatory journals will be regarded as guilty of unethical or unprofessional behaviour, with no credit given for the said publications in any form of evaluations and perhaps even stronger forms of censure. However, such judgements are premised on the assumption that authors have a real opportunity to publish in non-predatory journals. As supervisors and research leaders, we need to actively educate young researchers to avoid predatory journals. Young researchers, such as PhD students, should also learn to appreciate the merits of peer review. With an understanding of how a high-quality reviewing process is necessary to develop good papers, predatory journals will be less attractive. Other advice includes showing caution when receiving enticing invitations to publish one's work, always writing for concrete and identified audiences, and targeting the journals where you find the publications you cite yourself and that publish similar results. By avoid, we also mean encouraging them both not to submit their work to these journals and not to cite them. Editors and reviewers need to reflect on their role as gatekeepers and ask if they are sufficiently open to new ideas and topics that do not fit established parameters and conventional formats, for instance interdisciplinary research. Are researchers from some countries overrepresented in the editing and reviewing processes of reputable journals, and if so, what are the implications? Do personal or institutional biases impede the publication of good research? How can we ensure that the peer review process treats all authors fairly? Can we offer platforms for young and aspiring researchers, especially those from developing countries who are trying to establish themselves in the field? Should we find ways to increase our acceptance rates, thereby starving the predatory journals of content? These questions are deliberately provocative: we intend that they help to drive the debate; they are not statements of policy or personal preference. Some of these questions were addressed in earlier ISJ editorials (Davison, 2014, 2015), but we need to keep reflecting on how we ensure that our field is open to new ideas and people. Reputable journals could, at least in principle, refuse to process articles that cite predatory journals. This would ensure that the thin veneer of respectability that predatory journals might currently enjoy will be whittled away. However, such micro-managed editing will be both time consuming to operationalise and indeed contentious: the argument that a journal is predatory is rife with the opportunity for abuse. Perhaps we need more reputable journals that have decent but lower standards, yet that are not predatory. Journals that offer a modicum of respect, that are indexed somewhere (perhaps as a member of a basket of 80 or 800), yet that do not aspire to the standards of the premier journals of the field. However, even these lower-ranked journals will still want to enforce adherence to some standards: they will not publish anything that turns up. Thus, those authors who want to publish without any consideration for the quality of the research and who are manifestly unwilling to revise their articles in response to feedback may not meet the lower bar of even these journals. For such authors, predatory journals may be the only outlet available. Finally, we note that over the last few years we have witnessed open conflicts between universities and scientific publishers over subscription fees and Open Access, with some publishers receiving criticism for their staggering profit margins (The Guardian, 2019). The Plan S in Europe now mandates the publication of scientific research funded by public grants in Open Access compliant journals (see www.coalition-s.org). We expect to see a publishing landscape in transition, with new approaches and related business models emerging. Predatory publishers and journals will take this as an opportunity, and we can only expect that they will adapt to find their niche. We argue that during this time of transitions, we in the information systems research community should play an active role in shaping our future publishing landscape. In this issue of the ISJ, we present five articles. In the first article Malaurent and Karanasios (2020), Karanasios report on a longitudinal case study of an enterprise system implementation in a multinational corporation. Drawing on activity theory, the paper examines how the misfits between the enterprise system and its users at the multinational corporation's subsidiary led to the emergence of workaround practices. The case demonstrates that workarounds are not only a critical part of getting work done but also an integral part of the institutionalisation of an enterprise system. In the second article, Hataka, Thapa, Sæbø (2020) explore how the combination of ICT and self-organised study circles in Kenya improves rural communities' ability to enhance their economic opportunities. Study circles are a democratic and emancipatory method for learning, where community groups meet for discussions to educate themselves on a variety of topics. The main goal of the study circle members was to increase economic opportunities by using ICT to start micro-businesses, improve production efficacy and methods and obtain employment. The project was analysed using the capability approach and affordances, and the paper's main contribution are five practical lessons gleaned from the project. The lessons are related to the goals identified in the project, as well as the theoretical premise of combining the capability approach and affordances. In the third article, Sæbø, Federici, and Braccini (2020) employ the concept of affordances to explore how social media support the organisation of collective action in complex organisational settings. Based on a qualitative case analysis of the online community within an Italian political movement (the Five Star Movement), the authors identify a typology of nine affordances for collective action. Moreover, the authors discuss how these affordances are combined to create what is termed antecedents for the creation of collective action. The authors suggest a model describing how social media support collective actions through various affordances, and how the affordances are combined to achieve antecedents of collective action. In the fourth article, Venkatesh, Thong, Chan, Hoehle, and Spohrer (2020) examine how agile software development methods influence work exhaustion in software developers and how developer skills play into this effect. After nearly two decades of agile software development, researchers still struggle to explain why some developers become less exhausted when using agile methods whereas others perceive the exact opposite. The authors theorize how agile method use relates to individual developer skills and two major determinants of employee exhaustion: role conflict and role ambiguity. In a field study among roughly 1,900 software developers in more than 200 teams, they find that agile method use facilitates clear and unambiguous role perceptions and thereby reduces work exhaustion in developers, especially if developers possess the organizational skills to effectively interact with others in their organization. In the fifth article, Hafermalz, Johnston, Hovorka, and Riemer (2020) contribute a suite of new concepts to mobile technology research: moving-with-technology as a new analytical perspective; the new phenomena of digital sub-species, digital-niches and asynchronous co-location; and stimulus for new ecologically oriented ‘mobile methods’. They do so by adopting a unique problematisation approach, where they interrogate the lead author's first-hand experience of running with the exercise-tracking application ‘Strava’. Even without focal attention to the app, the runner found herself seeing and acting differently while running over part of her usual running track. This surprising experience prompted the authors to consider the relationship of attention, perception, movement and technology, which led them to draw on Gibson (1979) as they reinterpreted the empirical account. As a result, they arrived at a new understanding of ‘moving-with-technology’ that pushes research on mobile technology in new directions. The authors are grateful to Margunn Aanestad, Brian Nicholson, Niels Bjørn-Andersen, Tobias Mettler, Cynthia Beath and David Hull for comments received on this editorial.
Source: Information Systems Journal
DOI: 10.1111/isj.12289
Authors: Petter Nielsen, Robert M. Davison
Institutions: University of Oslo, City University of Hong Kong
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,000
OpenAlex ID: W3014242940