October 18, 2016 – Offered in collaboration with the Charleston Library Conference, the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) presents a pre-conference session titled Predators, “Pirates” and Privacy: Educating Researchers on New Challenges in Publishing. It will be held Wednesday, November 2, 2016, the day preceding the annual Charleston Conference, at the Courtyard Marriott, Charleston, SC.
From the journals on Beall’s List to the controversy surrounding the availability of articles on sites such as SciHub, the discussion focuses on the emerging challenges that scholarly communication faces from a new set of players. Today’s researchers must publish to attain promotion and tenure, but the increasingly complex publishing space now leaves them in need of a new and different level of support, from librarians, publishers, and peers.
Starting with panel sessions and then moving to a roundtable discussion, attendees will learn about the information industry conversations taking place around predatory publishing practices, “piracy,” and privacy, and how even seemingly innocuous actions (such as sharing a username and password) can have negative implications for faculty and researchers and their universities. They will also learn about the multitude of ways that predatory publishers attempt to manipulate authors through fake journals, fictitious editorial boards, lack of peer review, and spurious article processing charges.
A panel of experts has been recruited from the publishing, librarian, government, and vendor communities to discuss the challenges of authentication and privacy along with new ways to ensure the integrity of scholarly communications. Heather Staines, Director of Publisher and Content Strategy at ProQuest; Rick Anderson, Associate Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication at University of Utah – J Willard Marriott Library; Todd Carpenter, Executive Director at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO); Regina Reynolds, ISSN Coordinator at Library of Congress; Craig Griffin, Solutions Engineer at Silverchair Information Systems; Ken Varnum, Senior Program Manager for Discovery, Delivery, and Library Analytics at University of Michigan Library; David Crotty, Editorial Director, Journals Policy at Oxford University Press; Todd Toler, Vice President of Digital Product Management at Wiley.
“We all need to be aware of predatory journals that trap unwitting researchers and give legitimate publishers a bad name,” notes Staines, who is also a Member, Board of Directors at COUNTER. “We should also be aware of how pirate initiatives like SciHub threaten the scholarly communications ecosystem and trick researchers into sharing credentials that put their universities at risk. But improving security and access, as well as in collecting data needed for personalization features, requires balancing privacy issues with transparency.”
Registration for the event is open on the websites of both SSP and the Charleston Conference.