New Questionable Publisher
I recently added the new publisher called Webcrawler Journals to my list of questionable publishers. Like many questionable publishers, this one is not transparent about where it is based. My guess is Nigeria because many of the publishers from there have strange names and hide their locations.
Webcrawler Journals launched with nine new journals, including Webcrawler Journal of Biological Sciences (WJBS). This comes as a great relief, as the field of biology was in urgent need of a new open-access journal. There are so few of them. This publisher is much better than most at selecting pirated pictures to use on its website; the vegetable picture makes me want to submit a paper right away.
New List of Questionable Conferences
My friend Dana Roth, a librarian at the Caltech Library, has started a list of questionable conferences. It’s called Conferences – spammed and ??. Dana works in Pasadena, and I think his work in this area will create a big bang in the world of predatory conferences.
New Monograph about Academic Plagiarism
I recently finished reading the new book False feathers: A perspective on academic plagiarism by Debora Weber-Wulff. She’s the author of the blog Copy, Shake, and Paste. The book covers plagiarism by both academics and by university and college students. One of my favorite passages is this one:
It [plagiarism] is unfair to other students if plagiarism brings rewards, similar to doping in sports, as long as it remains undiscovered (p. 23).
Much of the book deals with plagiarism in dissertations, and Germany, where Weber-Wulff is from, has been at the center of many dissertation plagiarism scandals. She describes a cooperative, wiki approach to documenting plagiarism in dissertations. The study of academic plagiarism seems to be increasing, as is academic plagiarism itself. Dr. Weber-Wulff’s book is a valuable and timely contribution to this growing field.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2014 at 9:02 AM and is filed under Plagiarism, Scholarly Open-Access Publishers, Unethical Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
