Did the Research Faculty at a Small Canadian Business School Publish in “Predatory” Venues? This Depends on the Publishing Blacklist

The first ever quantitative paper to claim that papers published in so-called “predatory” open access (OA) journals and publishers were financially remunerated emerged from Canada. That study, published in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing (University of Toronto Press) in 2017 by Derek Pyne at Thompson Rivers University, garnered wide public and media attention, even by renowned news outlets such as The New York Times and The Economist. Pyne claimed to have found that most of the human subjects of his study had published in “predatory” OA journals, or in OA journals published by “predatory” OA publishers, as classified by Jeffrey Beall. In this paper, we compare the so-called “predatory” publications referred to in Pyne’s study with Walt Crawford’s gray open access (grayOA) list, as well as with Cabell’s blacklist, which was introduced in 2017. Using Cabell’s blacklist and Crawford’s grayOA list, we found that approximately 2% of the total publications (451) of the research faculty at the small business school were published in potentially questionable journals, contrary to the Pyne study, which found significantly more publications (15.3%). In addition, this research casts doubt to the claim made in Pyne’s study that research faculty members who have predatory publications have 4.3 “predatory” publications on average.