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Against the Grain is your key to the latest news about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents. Our goal is to link publishers, vendors, and librarians by reporting on the issues, literature, and people that impact the world of books and journals.

Against The Grain Journal

Charleston Library Conference 

Jul 5, 2021

Special Announcement

The Charleston Conference is planning a very special “In Between'' half-day virtual mini-conference event to explore important late-breaking developments that can’t wait until November for discussion. It will include a Panel on Clarivate's acquisition of ProQuest and a panel where savvy executives reflect upon what the bright light of post covid offers to them. We hope you'll join us on July 28 at 10:30 AM EST.  Registration is open now on our website. 

Registration Link for "Charleston In Between:"  https://charlestonconference.regfox.com/charleston-in-between

In today's episode we have an Interview of Anna Abalkina, research fellow, Freie Universität Berlin. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference. 

Anna has recently written an article for the Scholarly Kitchen entitled "Unethical Practices in Research and Publishing-Evidence From Russia."  She has a background in international economics, but recently has turned her focus towards Academic Misconduct, Plagiarism and predatory and hijack journals. 

Anna has been an expert at Disernet since its founding in 2013 and she is part of a network of Russian researchers.  She joined because she found her own paper had been plagiarized. When she asked the journal to react, she was unhappy with their response and realized the lack of rights authors can have. 

She said there is also wide plagiarism taking place in papers that have been translated from Russian to English and published outside of the Russian context by predatory journals. 

The network has certain criteria on what predatory is and the colors and shadows of predatory and dishonest practices. They are trying to create a ranking of Russian journals to predict quality, honesty and fraudulent behavior patterns. She says corruption and potential damage to the Russian economy prevent the government from taking action against violation of ethical principles in the field of scientific publications. She says the threat has been underestimated against academic publishing and academic integrity, and she will continue her work with detection of hijack journals and creating a list of hijack journals that is timely and updated regularly.