Predatory publishers are an increasingly prevalent problem. Jeffrey Beall’s list is getting a lot of coverage recently, including stories in Nature and in the New York Times . But the most recent and troubling predatory-publisher story I’ve read is about a lawsuit. No, not the Edwin Mellen Press libel suit.

I think the most painful part of the Elsevier-eats-Mendeley deal has been watching good people acting as apologists for Elsevier and then feeling hurt when people don’t accept their protestations. You can see a good example (but far from the only one) in the comments to Danah Boyd’s post on her #mendelete. I don’t know what Elsevier have been feeding their new minions, but whatever it is it seems to be working.

Yesterday I was in Oxford for the Rigour and Openness in 21st Century Science conference (web-site here, tweets here though they also include newer ones from Day 2 which is happening as I write this). There was a lot to enjoy about the day, including meeting Cameron Neylon of PLOS and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ, both for the first time.

There’s an awful lot of talk about “predatory open access publishers” recently. So much talk that I can’t help wondering whether the phrase is being pushed by barrier-based publishers in another attempt to smear open access.

As many of you will know, it’s now official that Elsevier has bought Mendeley, previously a force for openness in the world of reference management. There’s some good commentary at The Scholarly Kitchen. Lots of open advocates — Ross Mounce, for example — are shutting down their accounts and moving to free alternatives such as Zotero. Unequivocal good guys at Mendeley, such as William Gunn, are painting this as optimistically as they can.

Just like the last time I tried to post a comment on Richard Van Noorden’s piece on open-access economics, the comment I posted has been rejected with a fatuous “This account has been banned from commenting due to posting of comments classified as inappropriate or other violations of our Terms of Service” message. SERIOUSLY, NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP.

As is now well known, Edwin Mellen Press sued librarian Dale Askey for posting a negative review of their products. Now they have threatened to sue the Scholarly Kitchen for writing about this, and also to sue one of the commenters on that site. I, of course, am not a librarian, and so have no opinion of my own regarding Edwin Mellen Press.

I was struck by this bit of prevarication in Richard Van Noorden’s new piece on open access. First the set-up: So far, so good. And then we have this: What does the weasel-word “appropriate” mean here? Is Alicia saying that she doesn’t think what Eisen’s saying is correct ? No, if that’s what she meant, she would have said so. “I don’t think it’s right to say X” is a much stronger statement.

My thanks for Richard Van Noorden for drawing my attention to his new piece Open access: The true cost of science publishing in Nature . I wrote a detailed comment on this article, but when I went to post it, I was told “This account has been banned from commenting due to posting of comments classified as inappropriate or other violations of our Terms of Service”: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8169 loading=“lazy”

A couple of years ago, Matt wrote about the conflict between authors and publishers. Yesterday, two offical statements about the FASTR bill showed us with devastating clarity that publishers are opposed to libraries, too.