“Blacklists” and “whitelists”: a salutary warning concerning the prevalence of racist language in discussions of predatory publishing

Abstract

This commentary addresses the widespread use of racist language in discussions concerning predatory publishing. Examples include terminology such as blacklists, whitelists, and black sheep. The use of such terms does not merely reflect a racist culture, but also serves to legitimize and perpetuate it.

Differential enrichment of H3K9me3 at annotated satellite DNA repeats in human cell lines and during fetal development in mouse

“…The consequence of this is that the sequencing reads accumulate at such regions and the signal is interpreted as much higher than it actually is, which leads not only to false-positive peaks, but also to erroneous normalization of signal between samples [35]. We identified annotated satellite DNA instances that overlapped the coordinates of problematic regions compiled by the ENCODE project [27], which we refer to as the blocklist throughout the manuscript [36,37]. About 50% of satellite instances for hg19 assembly and 0.05% for mm10 assembly overlapped their corresponding blocklists (see, Additional file 2: Table S3 and S4).…”

How reliable and useful is Cabell's Blacklist ? A data-driven analysis

“…Second, some authors publishing in fake journals "are aware that the journals do not adhere to accepted standards but choose to publish in them anyway, hence they are not 'prey'" (Laine & Winker, 2017); they deliberately choose to publish in such fake journals for reasons that include fierce competition and a desire of career advancement (Shaghaei et al, 2018). 2 We are aware that using the terms blacklist and whitelist may have some racist overtones for some readers (Houghton & Houghton, 2018). We would like to stress that our use of these terms is not meant to perpetuate racist culture.…”

Response to: Schira, H. R., & Hurst, C. (2019). Hype or Real Threat: The Extent of Predatory Journals in Student Bibliographies. Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 14(1).

“…Before continuing it must be acknowledged that Beall's list of potential, possible, or probable predatory journals is imperfect and has often been described as lacking transparency and being subjective (Berger & Cirasella, 2015;Bloudoff-Indelicato, 2015;Crawford, 2016;da Silva, 2017ada Silva, , 2017bda Silva, , 2018. Although Schira and Hurst acknowledge these points, they fail to mention other critiques of Beall's work that have noted its racist overtones (Houghton, 2017), or that highlight the racially charged terminology in his and other discussions of predatory publishing (Houghton & Houghton, 2018).…”