Dive Summary:
- India's OMICS Publishing Group is threatening to sue Jeffrey Beall, a University of Colorado at Denver metadata librarian and academic blogger, for $1 billion in damages.
- Beall's popular blog, Scholarly Open Access, features a list of over 250 open-access journals and publishers deemed "potential, possible, or probable predatory" companies, and the OMICS Group has taken offense to its inclusion on the list, going so far as to accuse Beall of racial discrimination and attempting to "strangle the culture of open access publications."
- A letter sent to Beall from the publisher's lawyer also threatens that he could be imprisoned for up to three years under India's Information Technology Act, making the additional demand that he remove the blog posts and send e-mails denouncing the blog to publishers that have featured his work.
From the article:
... "I found the letter to be poorly written and personally threatening," Mr. Beall said. "I think the letter is an attempt to detract from the enormity of OMICS's editorial practices." Mr. Beall believes he has documented all the statements he made about OMICS.
The blog and the list, which is known to librarians and professors simply as "Beall's List," has led to Mr. Beall's being featured in The New York Times, Nature, and The Chronicle. ...