On "predatory" publishing: A reply to Maistry

Abstract

I reply to an article in this issue of Journal of Education by Suriamurthee Moonsamy Maistry entitled, "(Re)Counting the High Cost of Predatory Publishing and the Effect of a Neoliberal Performativity Culture." In his article, Maistry confessed his "wrong-doing" in having published articles in predatory journals. He argued that he alone is to blame for his "trangressions" because academia is necessarily a critical space that demands astuteness and constant vigilance, which he failed to uphold. Through showing remorse, he hopes to restore his academic reputation, which he believes has been eroded. In my response, I address four matters: the struggle to be an ethical researcher in the neoliberal university, the contested nature of predatory publishing, peer review as a practice fraught with difficulties, and the invocation of an immanent ethics in becoming ethical. Instead of focusing only on issues of moral decline (Beall, 2012) and moral failings (Maistry, 2019), I suggest that in a digital age we should use the opportunities that open-access publishing provides for democratising academic publishing and making it as affordable to as many people as possible. This requires, as Willinsky and Alperin (2011) argued, treating the ethical domain as a realm of positive action where one goes out of one's way to help others instead of focusing on issues such as exam cheating and research fudging-in this instance, "predatory" publishing.

The effects of personal epistemological beliefs on pedagogical use of information and communications technologies: A comparative case of Gauteng and North-West provinces in South Africa

“…Universities are then perceived as key players in economic development through researchbased knowledge production and dissemination, and through the development of highly skilled human capital to sustain such productivity (Bloom, Canning & Chan 2006;McKenna et al 2018). There are many arguments in the literature that suggest that this has had the effect of conceptualising knowledge as 'an intangible commercial good' (Hove 2018:11;Le Grange 2019;Tomaselli 2018:2) that can be marketed for economic benefits, rather than as a public good (e.g. Maistry 2019;Shore 2010;Slaughter & Rhoades 2004).…”

The Unintended Consequences of Using Direct Incentives to Drive the Complex Task of Research Dissemination

“…The problem with predatory publications is that they do not get read or cited, and so they fail to contribute to knowledge dissemination (Hedding 2019;Le Grange 2019;Maistry 2019). It can be argued that it is an exchange-value culture that makes it possible for such publications to flourish and, therefore, there is a need to nurture a research culture focused on the ends of knowledge dissemination and not the means of output (Muthama and McKenna 2017).…”

Normative drift and self‐correction in scholarly book publishing: The case of Makerere University

“…(, p. 294) suggest that the “‘ethical university’ is continually placed under erasure, as managerialism and competitive individualism become entrenched as everyday, albeit contested, aspects of research activities, workplace practices and academic cultures” (p. 294). Le Grange (, p. 23) confers: “ethical norms become realigned with a culture of performativity, and couched in terms of rewards and sanctions. The upshot of this is that academics who inhabit universities sometimes find themselves at sea; they fumble, and sometimes fall, in efforts to navigate competing and new demands”.…”