Categories
Academia

Short review of the International Journal of Digital Library Services

If you do not like Elsevier’s misinterpretation of the Creative Commons licences, then stay away from the International Journal of Digital Library Services.

Reviewing this journal was easy. (I was partially inspired by Jeffrey Beall’s list of things to look for to determine ‘predatoriness’.) The website features animated GIF images and other very general images as ‘context’ on its homepage, capitalised titles, uses the ISSN in title references, and features many spelling and grammar mistakes. But most importantly, and the only real reason to recommend not doing business with this journal, is that the copyright page reads:

Articles which are published in IJODLS are under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons [Attribution] License. Aim of IJODLS is to disseminate information of scholarly research published in related to library and information science.
The submission of the manuscript means that the authors automatically agree to assign exclusive copyright to Editor-in-Chief of IJODLS for printed and electronic versions of IJODLS, if the manuscript is accepted for publication. The work shall not then be published elsewhere in any language without the written consent of the publisher. The articles published in IJODLS are protected by copyright, which covers translation rights and the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute all of the articles printed in the journal.

In other words: this journal (“intellectual property rights” being one of its keywords in DOAJ) doesn’t get licences right. Any journal that requires transfer of copyrights for publication will not get my recommendations, but this copyright statement makes me distrust the publisher.