LibGuides: Publishing your research: Predatory publishing

Predatory publishing?

“Over the past decade a group of scholarly journals have proliferated that have become known as “predatory journals” produced by “predatory publishers.” “Predatory” refers to the fact that these entities prey on academicians for financial profit via article processing charges for open access articles, without meeting scholarly publishing standards”

From: http://www.wame.org/identifying-predatory-or-pseudo-journals

Note: “If an author is aware of predatory publishing and decides to publish a paper in a journal even after experiencing a perfunctory or nonexistent review process, then predatory publishing becomes fraudulent and unethical publishing. It is important that inexperienced researchers be made aware of the difference between an acceptable review process and a fraudulent one.”

Ray, M. (2016). An Expanded Approach to Evaluating Open Access Journals. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 47(4), 307-327.

What is an academic to do?

Harzing, A.W.; Adler N.J. (2016) Disseminating knowledge: From potential to reality – New open-access journals collide with convention, Academy of Management Learning & Education, vol. 15(1):140-156. Available online... Publisher’s version.

Anne-Wil Harzing offers the following suggestions for academics:

“Before submitting to a journal, check:

The editor’s and editorial board’s publication records
Whether the journal’s articles can be found in Google Scholar
Some sample articles from the journal’s website, after all they are Open Access, so do some due diligence

As with any scam: If it sounds too good to be true it usually is....”

From: http://harzing.com/download/predatoryoa.pdf

Note: Predatory journals are sometimes indexed by "white lists" such as DOAJ or Web of Science see this article in Nature Open-access index delists thousands of journals and this blog post:

https://harzing.com/publications/white-papers/authoring-esi-highly-cited-papers

Think Check Submit Checklist

Think. Check. Submit. is a campaign to help researchers identify trusted journals for their research. It is a simple checklist researchers can use to assess the credentials of a journal or publisher.

Think Check Submit Checklist:

Reference this list for your chosen journal to check if it is trusted.

Assessing Open Access Journals

For help in assessing Open Access journals you may consult these directories:

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals

An online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association

The membership list for the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. OASPA promotes “a uniform definition of OA publishing, best practices for maintaining and disseminating OA scholarly communications, and ethical standards.”

Biochemia Medica - Special issue on predatory publishing

This special issue of Biochemia Medica reflects the growth in predatory publishing over the last decade. The editorial cites an estimated 8000 predatory journals published worldwide (Habibzadeh, 2017)

Biochemia Medica 2017;27(2):273–8: Research integrity corner: Special issue on predatory journals

Available at: http://www.biochemia-medica.com/node/830

Editorial

Farrokh Habibzadeh, Ana-Maria Simundic. Predatory journals and their effects on scientific research community.Biochemia Medica 2017;27(2):270-2. https://doi.org/10.11613/BM.2017.02

Opinion

Jeffrey Beall. What I learned from predatory publishers. Biochemia Medica 2017;27(2):273-8.https://doi.org/10.11613/BM.2017.029

Review

Lorraine E. Ferris, Margaret A Winker. Ethical issues in publishing in predatory journals. Biochemia Medica 2017;27(2):279-84. https://doi.org/10.11613/BM.2017.030

Christine Laine, Margaret A. Winker. Identifying predatory or pseudo-journals. Biochemia Medica 2017;27(2):285-91.https://doi.org/10.11613/BM.2017.031