Friends: A very good proposal. Membership in the editorial boards of low quality journals should be given negative points in evaluation of a scientists for Fellowships, funds and promotion, says a distinguished American chemist. We certainly need to follow such a policy in India. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] From Peter Suber's blog A modest proposal to curb journal proliferation Chris Reed, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry (University of California, Riverside), offers the following modest proposal on CHMINF-L: Colleagues: In last week's interesting CHMINF-L discussion on Nature's proliferation of new journals, faculty habits, and the serials market, I saw no mention of an ongoing parallel onslaught by Bentham. In the past month, I have received no less that three invitations to join the editorial boards of new Bentham journals -- "Current this", "Frontiers of that" -- none in areas of my real expertise. The same old tactics are being used: exploiting a faculty weakness for seeing one's name in print, offering a career advance by having Editorial Board appointments on one's CV at promotion time, flattering authors with invitations to contribute papers in special issues, etc. All this effectively silences faculty from speaking out, or even caring about, the issues librarians understand so well. It is one of the reasons I am advocating that promotion policies at the University of California specify that appointments to the editorial boards of low quality, overpriced journals should count against promotion. The idea may not be so outrageous in five or ten years time. I have also recommended that the best way to change faculty habits is the pay them. Overpriced journals should be cancelled and some of the saved money given to Departments whose faculty agree not to submit to, referee for, accept editorial board appointments on journals they decide are too exploitive. Let me be a little provocative here. How far are librarians willing to go on this? Personally, I'd love to see faculty and librarians form a real partnership on this. (And its not the money driving me). PS. In case you are wondering, yes, I did hit the delete key on those Bentham invitations. Friends: A very good proposal. Membership in the editorial boards of low quality journals should be given negative points in evaluation of a scientists for Fellowships, funds and promotion, says a distinguished American chemist. We certainly need to follow such a policy in India. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] From Peter Suber's blog A modest proposal to curb journal proliferation http://www.chem.ucr.edu/faculty/reed/reed.html Chris Reed , Distinguished Professor of Chemistry ( http://ucr.edu/ University of California, Riverside ), offers the following https://listserv.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/wa-iub.exe?A2=ind0604&L=CHMINF-L&P=R10547&I=-3 modest proposal on CHMINF-L : Colleagues: In last week's interesting CHMINF-L discussion on Nature's proliferation of new journals, faculty habits, and the serials market, I saw no mention of an ongoing parallel onslaught by Bentham. In the past month, I have received no less that three invitations to join the editorial boards of new Bentham journals -- "Current this", "Frontiers of that" -- none in areas of my real expertise. The same old tactics are being used: exploiting a faculty weakness for seeing one's name in print, offering a career advance by having Editorial Board appointments on one's CV at promotion time, flattering authors with invitations to contribute papers in special issues, etc. All this effectively silences faculty from speaking out, or even caring about, the issues librarians understand so well. It is one of the reasons I am advocating that promotion policies at the University of California specify that appointments to the editorial boards of low quality, overpriced journals should count against promotion. The idea may not be so outrageous in five or ten years time. I have also recommended that the best way to change faculty habits is the pay them. Overpriced journals should be cancelled and some of the saved money given to Departments whose faculty agree not to submit to, referee for, accept editorial board appointments on journals they decide are too exploitive. Let me be a little provocative here. How far are librarians willing to go on this? Personally, I'd love to see faculty and librarians form a real partnership on this. (And its not the money driving me). PS. In case you are wondering, yes, I did hit the delete key on those Bentham invitations.