“Jeffrey Beall, an American librarian who gained notoriety publishing a list of open access publishers and journals considered as ‘predatory’ by him, posted in his blog an unbelievably mistaken and prejudiced article, beginning with its title, ‘Is SciELO a Publication Favela?’1 Based on an ethnocentric and purely commercial point of view, Mr. Beall supposes that, since the whole ensemble of its publications are not indexed by Thomson Reuter’s bibliographic database, and because of the discontinuation of a proposal by a Brazilian government agency to hire a commercial publisher to disseminate some of the nation’s periodicals, SciELO’s publications would be ‘hidden from the world’ (sic). Seemingly in order to promote commercial publishers, Mr. Beall despises the asset that the SciELO collection represents, and makes factually incorrect assertions. Contrary to his statements, the whole collection is already indexed in the Scopus database. Also in opposition to another of his mistaken affirmations, SciELO has adopted for some time the Creative Commons license, which means that there is no risk of an article ‘losing its interest’ due to author’s copyright issues. One paragraph in particular demonstrates the prejudices, classism, imperialism and crass commercialism present in the tone of Mr. Beall’s diatribe: ‘Thus, commercial publisher platforms are nice neighborhoods for scholarly publications. On the other hand, some open-access platforms are more like publication favelas’ …”
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