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Predatory Journals

Predatory journals actively solicit manuscripts from researchers but lack proper peer review and editorial boards. They often publish low-quality papers solely to charge publication fees without providing legitimate scholarly services. Researchers should be wary of these journals as publishing in them can corrupt the academic literature and mislead others about the quality of their work. Various studies have exposed predatory journals by getting computer-generated nonsense papers and unqualified scientists accepted. Scholars can check for warning signs like missing or fake editorial boards, poor website quality, and surprise article fees to identify potentially predatory journals.

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Predatory Journals What Are Predatory Journals And Why Should We Worry?
What is a predatory journal? • A predatory journal is a publication that actively asks researchers for manuscripts. • They have no peer review system and no true editorial board and are often found to publish mediocre or even worthless papers. • They also ask for huge publication charges.
What Is A Predatory Journal?
Predatory Journal • Predatory journals is a phrase (now in wider usage) coined by Jeffrey Beall, scholarly communications librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver, that refers to journals (and journal publishers) whose main purpose seems to be to exploit ("prey on") scholars and academics and their need to publish the results of their research.
Jeffrey Beall, University of Colorado, Denver
Introduction • In March 2008, Gunther Eysenbach, publisher of an early open access journal, drew attention to what he called, • "black sheep among open access publishers and journals”
Introduction • In July 2008, Richard Poynder's interview series brought attention to the practices of new publishers who were "better able to exploit the opportunities of the new environment." • Doubts about honesty and scams in a subset of open-access journals continued to be raised in 2009. • Concerns for spamming practices ushered the leading open access publishers to create the • “Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association in 2008”.
Richard Poynder
Introduction • In another early precedent, in 2009 the Improbable Research blog had found that Scientific Research Publishing's journals duplicated papers already published elsewhere; the case was subsequently reported in Nature.
Introduction • In 2010, Cornell University graduate student Phil Davis (editor of the Scholarly Kitchen blog) submitted a manuscript consisting of computer-generated nonsense (using SCIgen) which was accepted for a fee (but withdrawn by the author).
CRAP Paper Accepted By Journal Phil Davis is a publishing consultant specializing in the statistical analysis of citation, readership, publication and survey data. He has a Ph.D. in science communication from Cornell University (2010), extensive experience as a science librarian (1995-2006) and was trained as a life scientist.
Introduction • Predatory publishers have been reported to hold submissions hostage, refusing to allow them to be withdrawn and thereby preventing submission in another journal.
Bohannon's experiment "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" • In 2013, John Bohannon, a staff writer for the journal Science and for popular science publications, targeted the open access system by submitting to a number of such journals a deeply flawed paper and published the results in a paper called, "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?". • About 60% of those journals, including the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, accepted the faked medical paper, and 40%, including the most established one, PLOS ONE, rejected it.
Bohannon's experiment "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?"
'Dr Fraud' experiment • In 2015, four researchers created a fictitious sub- par scientist named Anna O. Szust (oszust is Polish for "fraud" [person]), and applied on her behalf for an editor position to 360 scholarly journals. • Szust's qualifications were dismal for the role of an editor; she had never published a single article and had no editorial experience. • The books and book chapters listed on her CV were made-up, as were the publishing houses that published the books.
'Dr Fraud' experiment
'Dr Fraud' experiment • One-third of the journals to which Szust applied were sampled from Beall's List of 'predatory' journals. • Forty of these predatory journals accepted Szust as editor without any background vetting and often within days or even hours. • By comparison, she received minimal to no positive response from the "control" journals which "must meet certain standards of quality, including ethical publishing practices."
Anna O. Szust (oszust is Polish for "fraud" [person]
'Dr Fraud' experiment • Among journals sampled from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), 8 of 120 accepted Szust. • The DOAJ has since removed some (but not all) of the affected journals in a recent purge. None of the 120 sampled journals listed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) offered Szust the position. • The results of the experiment were published in Nature in March 2017, and widely presented in the press.
'Dr Fraud' experiment
SCIgen experiments • SCIgen, a computer program that randomly generates academic computer science papers using context-free grammar, has generated papers that have been accepted by a number of predatory journals as well as predatory conferences.
How three MIT students fooled the world of scientific journals
How three MIT students fooled the world of scientific journals • Ten years ago, a few students at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) had noticed such unscrupulous practices, and set out to have some mischievous fun with it. Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and Max Krohn PhD ’ spent a week or two between class projects to develop “SCIgen,” a program that randomly generates nonsensical computer-science papers, complete with realistic-looking graphs, figures, and citations. • The program was crude, but it did the trick: In April of 2005 the team’s submission, “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy,” was accepted as a non-reviewed paper to the World Multi-conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), a conference that Krohn says is known for “being spammy and having loose standards.”
Why do academics publish in such journals? • In research environments, there is usually more value for quantity over quality. • Hiring and promotion of academics is based largely on their number of publications. Predatory journals has helped many pseudo-researchers to prosper.
Why do academics publish in such journals?
What is the harm caused by predatory journals? • Predatory and low-quality journals corrupt the literature. • Medical science has been particularly hit hard, with journals now devoted to unscientific medicine. • “Peer review is at the heart of academic evaluation. • Publishing without peer review [while pretending that peer review was done] gives poor and mediocre academics a chance for jobs and promotions which should go to better qualified researchers,”
What is the harm caused by predatory journals?
How does one find out if a given journal is predatory or not? • some people think any journal from an unknown publisher, or a journal that charges for publication, is necessarily predatory. • That is not necessarily correct. The important thing is to dig deeper and find the quality of submitted manuscripts and its standards,”
How does one find out if a given journal is predatory or not?
Beall’s criteria for identification of predatory journals • Here is a curated list Beall’s criteria for identification of predatory journals and publishers • No single individual is identified as specific journal’s editor with no formal editorial/review board or the same editorial board for more than one journal. • The editor and/or review board members do not have academic expertise in the journal’s field.
Beall’s criteria for identification of predatory journals
Beall’s criteria for identification of predatory journals • Provides insufficient information or hides information about author fees, offering to publish an author’s paper and later sending an unanticipated ‘surprise’ invoice. • No proper indexing. • The name of a journal is unrelated with the journal’s mission. • The name of a journal does not adequately reflect its origin (e.g. a journal with the word ‘Canadian’ or ‘Swiss’ in its name when neither the publisher, editor, nor any purported institutional affiliate relates whatsoever to Canada or Switzerland).
Beall’s criteria for identification of predatory journals
Checklist to Identify Fake Journal • Do you or your colleagues know the journal? • Can you easily identify and contact the publisher? • Is the journal clear about the type of peer review it uses? • Are articles indexed in services that you use? • Is it clear what fees will be charged? • Do you recognise the editorial board? • Is the publisher a member of a recognised industry initiative (COPE,DOAJ,OASPA)?
Checklist to Identify Fake Journal
Checklist to Identify Fake Journal • The publisher has poorly maintained websites, including dead links, prominent misspellings and grammatical errors on the website. • The publisher makes unauthorised use of licensed images on their website, taken from the open web, without permission or licensing from the copyright owners. • Re-publish papers already published in other venues/outlets without providing appropriate credits.
Checklist to Identify Fake Journal
Checklist to Identify Fake Journal • Use boastful language claiming to be a ‘leading publisher’ even though the publisher may only be a start-up or a novice organisation. • Provide minimal or no copyediting or proofreading of submissions. • Publish papers that are not academic at all, e.g. essays by lay people, polemical editorials, or pseudo-science. • Have a ‘contact us’ page that only includes a web form or an email address, and the publisher hides or does not reveal its location. • The publisher publishes journals that are excessively broad (e.g. Journal of Education) or combine two or more fields not normally treated together (e.g. International Journal of Business, Humanities and Technology) in order to attract more articles and gain more revenue from author fees.
Checklist to Identify Fake Journal
Characteristics of Predatory Journals • Accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control, including hoax and nonsensical papers. • Notifying academics of article fees only after papers are accepted. • Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or serve on editorial boards. • Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission, and not allowing academics to resign from editorial boards. • Appointing fake academics to editorial boards. • Mimicking the name or web site style of more established journals. • Making misleading claims about the publishing operation, such as a false location. • Using ISSNs improperly. • Citing fake or non-existent impact factors.
Characteristics of Predatory Journals
Predatory Open Access Publishing • Predatory open-access publishing is an exploitative open-access academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals (open access or not).
Predatory Open Access Publishing
Predatory open access publishing • The idea that they are "predatory" is based on the view that academics are tricked into publishing with them, though some authors may be aware that the journal is poor quality or even fraudulent. • New scholars from developing countries are said to be especially at risk of being misled by predatory practices.
Predatory open access publishing
Growth And Structure • Predatory journals have rapidly increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 active journals. • Early on, publishers with more than 100 journals dominated the market, but since 2012 publishers in the 10–99 journal size category have captured the largest market share. • The regional distribution of both the publisher's country and authorship is highly skewed, with three quarters of authors hailing from Asia or Africa. Authors paid an average fee of 178 USD per article for articles typically published within 2 to 3 months of submission
Growth And Structure
Response Beall's list • University of Colorado Denver librarian and researcher Jeffrey Beall, who coined the term "predatory publishing", first published his list of predatory publishers in 2010. • Beall's list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers attempted to identify scholarly open access publishers with questionable practices. • In 2013, Nature reported that Beall's list and web site were "widely read by librarians, researchers, and open- access advocates, many of whom applaud his efforts to reveal shady publishing practices.”
Beall's list
Cabells' lists • At the May 2017 meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, Cabell's International, a company that offers scholarly publishing analytics and other scholarly services, announced that it intended to launch a blacklist of predatory journals (not publishers) in June, The company had started work on its blacklist criteria in early 2016. • In July 2017, both a black list and a white list were offered for subscription on their website.
Cabells' lists
Other Efforts • More transparent peer review, such as open peer review and post-publication peer review, has been advocated to combat predatory journals. • In an effort to "set apart legitimate journals and publishers from non-legitimate ones", principles of transparency and best practice have been identified and issued collectively by the Committee on Publication Ethics, the DOAJ, the, and the World Association of Medical Editors. • Open Access Scholarly Publishers journal review websites (crowd-sourced or expert-run) have been started, some focusing on the quality of the peer review process and extending to non-OA publications. A group of libraries and publishers launched an awareness campaign.
Other Efforts
Other Efforts • A number of measures have been suggested to further combat predatory journals. • Others have called on research institutions to improve the publication literacy notably among junior researchers in developing countries. • Some organisations have also developed criteria in which predatory publishers could be spotted through providing tips that include avoiding fast publishers
Other Efforts
HRD ministry to remove all bogus journals • A requirement that scholars get at least two research papers published in a University Grants Commission-approved journal before submitting their doctoral theses, coupled with pressure on university teachers to get their research published regularly in academic periodicals, has produced an unexpected side-effect: It has led to a proliferation of dubious journals.
HRD ministry to remove all bogus journals
HRD ministry to remove all bogus journals • For the study titled “A critical analysis of the ‘UGC-approved list of journals’, a team of six researchers, in association with the human resource development (HRD) ministry, analysed 1,336 academic periodicals randomly selected from a list of 5,699 journals in the so-called university-source component. • Their conclusion: “Over 88% of non-indexed journals in the university source component of UGC-approved list could be of low quality.”
HRD ministry to remove all bogus journals • While the UGC website lists 32,659 journals, university-source journals (5,699) are those which are recommended by various universities in the country, the paper notes. • UGC has admitted that it received several complaints about the inclusion of low-quality journals soon after the release of its approved list of journals on June 2, 2017. The UGC has removed a few journals after an evaluation, the paper said.
HRD ministry to remove all bogus journals
HRD ministry to remove all bogus journals • The dubious publications were identified by the team of researchers that included Bhushan Patwardhan, a professor at the Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), a special invitee member on the UGC Standing Committee for Notification of Journals and former vice-chancellor of Symbiosis International University
Prof. Bhushan Patwardhan, Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU)
HRD ministry to remove all bogus journals • Out of the 1,336 journals studied, 897 were disqualified from the UGC- approved list of journals by the human resource development ministry for providing false information such as an incorrect ISSN (International Standard Serial Number), making false claims about the impact getting published in their pages would have, indexing in dubious databases, poor credentials of editors and non-availability of information such as an address, website details and names of editors. Papers published in the disqualified journals will not be considered valid.
HRD ministry to remove all bogus journals
HRD ministry to remove all bogus journals • “It is an alarming situation that such a huge percentage of the journals are bogus. Globally, it hampers the image of our country,” Patwardan said. • The HRD ministry has adopted a very positive approach to dealing with the issue “and has decided to remove all the bogus journals from the UGC list shortly,” Patwardhan said.
HRD ministry to remove all bogus journals
Case Study: Dozens of Scientific Journals Offered Her a Job. But She Didn't Exist • If you received a resumé and cover letter from an Anna O. Fraud, you might sense something fishy. • If you got one from an Anna O. Szust, you’d probably be less concerned — even though oszust means “a fraud” in Polish. • Either way, in a recent scientific sting operation reported in Nature, plenty of potential employers liked the fictitious Dr. Szust just fine — enough that 48 of them offered her a job. And that’s a big problem.
Case Study: Dozens of Scientific Journals Offered Her a Job. But She Didn't Exist
Case Study: Dozens of Scientific Journals Offered Her a Job. But She Didn't Exist • The investigation was conducted by a team of researchers led by Piotr Sorokowski, of the University of Wroclaw in Poland, and described in Nature by co-researcher Katarzyna Pisanski, who is affiliated both with Wroclaw and with the University of Sussex in the U.K. • The goal of the sting was to expose so-called predatory journals — science publications that charge fees to publish science, accepting all comers with all manner of papers provided there’s money to be made.
Piotr Sorokowski, University of Wroclaw
Case Study: Dozens of Scientific Journals Offered Her a Job. But She Didn't Exist • The “publish or perish” dictum is a very real thing for researchers and academics whose hopes for career advancement depend on doing work that earns a spot in peer-reviewed journals. • That has led to the rise of a staggering 10,000 predatory journals, which both charge fees to publish unvetted work and recruit scientists to fill editorial positions, lending a patina of credibility to their generally shabby operations and offering a prestigious sounding title to the scientists in return. • By 2015, approximately half-a-million dubious papers had been published this way.
Publish Or Perish
Case Study: Dozens of Scientific Journals Offered Her a Job. But She Didn't Exist • Pisanski and her colleagues selected 360 journals to approach in their study. • Of these, 120 each came from two legitimate directories of science publications: The Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The final 120 came from a less formal directory known as “Beall’s list,” a compendium of suspect journals compiled by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado.
Case Study: Dozens of Scientific Journals Offered Her a Job. But She Didn't Exist
Case Study: Dozens of Scientific Journals Offered Her a Job. But She Didn't Exist • All 360 got a letter from “Dr. Szust” seeking a position on their editorial board. • Her resume consisted of a string of phony degrees and invented book chapters pertinent to her wide- ranging academic interests. • A web presence was also created for Szust on Academia.edu, Google+ and Twitter. • Since the entire study was, in effect, an act of fraud — even if it was designed to expose far more pernicious fraud — the researchers were required to seek approval from a university ethics review board, which they received.
Case Study: Dozens of Scientific Journals Offered Her a Job. But She Didn't Exist
Case Study: Dozens of Scientific Journals Offered Her a Job. But She Didn't Exist • The responses the investigators got from the three groups of journals differed widely. • None of the JCR publications offered a spot on the masthead to the imaginary Szust. Only 40% of them sent her any response at all. Of the journals listed on the DOAJ, eight did make a job offer, though the responses from the remaining 112 broke down more or less the same way they did on the JCR. • Some of the journals that rejected her also chided her for her approaching them at all: “One does not become an editor by sending in the CV; these positions are filled because a person has a high research profile,” one wrote.
Case Study: Dozens of Scientific Journals Offered Her a Job. But She Didn't Exist
Case Study: Dozens of Scientific Journals Offered Her a Job. But She Didn't Exist • The Beall’s list journals, on the other hand, couldn’t get enough of the good Dr. Fraud. • Forty of them offered her an editorial spot and some responses came within hours. • Four of them offered her the top slot — editor in chief. One of them even specified that the job came “with no responsibilities.” • And the journals did not do much to conceal their pecuniary motivations either. • Any money Szust generated by attracting scientists who would pay to publish would be split 60-40, with the journal taking the larger share and her keeping the remainder. Sometimes an upfront fee was requested from Szust — a mandatory $750 “subscription” to the journal, for example.
Case Study: Dozens of Scientific Journals Offered Her a Job. But She Didn't Exist
Case Study: Dozens of Scientific Journals Offered Her a Job. But She Didn't Exist • Spotting and avoiding predatory journals is not terribly difficult. • A catalog like Beall’s, for example, is effectively a blacklist, and both DOAC and JDR serve as whitelists, according to Pisanski and her colleagues. The bigger problem, they say, is finding a way to scale back the consuming role of publishing in determining academic advancement — or at least reducing the constant stress the process causes the academics themselves. • Some of history’s best science has been done under extreme pressure . But most research is slow, thoughtful and iterative. Both the science and the scientists are at their best when they’re allowed to take their time.
Terminology Guest Or Gift Authors • A guest author is somebody who did not contribute in any way to the research and writing, but is included in the author list because they confer extra credibility on the article. • A gift author is one who may have a slight relationship with the study or the article, but who would not be considered an author according to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines.
Guest Or Gift Authors • Guest/gift authorship is thought to be quite common. • A frequent example is the head of department or the PhD supervisor being named in all articles. • In some regions of the world this is not only expected but also required – so many authors will not realise that it is considered unethical to include these people.
Guest Authorship
Gift Authors
Ghost Authors • A ghost author is a person who should be listed as an author, but has been excluded. • This term is most often used to identify authors who are professional (medical communications) writers. • These are usually commissioned (and often paid) by pharmaceutical companies to produce a paper from raw data. The authors listed on the article may have undertaken the research, created and perhaps analysed the data, but not written the article.
Ghost Authors
Ghost Authors • Ghost authorship is more common in some journals than others, and there are guidelines for such articles developed by the European Medical Writers Association. • The guidelines require that the named authors should have been involved with the article from the start and should lead the writing, and that any involvement of professional medical writers must be acknowledged within the article (if they are not named as an author).
Terminology
Lead Author • The lead author, or first author, is the first named author of a publication such as a research article • Academic authorship standards vary widely across disciplines. In many academic subjects, including the natural sciences, computer science and electrical engineering, the lead author of a research article is typically the person who carried out the research, wrote and edited the paper. • The list of trailing co-authors reflects, typically, diminishing contributions to the work reported in the manuscript. Sometimes, journals require statements detailing each author's contributions to be included in each publication.
Lead Author
Co-Author • A co-author is someone who works with another person to write something. • According to the ICMJE guidelines, anyone who fulfils all of the following criteria can be an author: • Contributes significantly to the conception, design, execution, and/or analysis and interpretation of data • Participates in drafting and/or revising part of the manuscript for intellectual content • Approves of the version to be published • Agrees to be accountable for all aspects of the work
Co-Author
Why research papers have so many authors ? • ONE thing that determines how quickly a researcher climbs the academic ladder is his publication record. The quality of this clearly matters—but so does its quantity. • There is another way to pad publication lists: co- authoring. Say you write one paper a year. If you team up with a colleague doing similar work and write two half-papers instead, both parties end up with their names on twice as many papers, but with no increase in workload. Find a third researcher to join in and you can get your name on three papers a year. And so on.
Why research papers have so many authors ?
Peer Review • Scholarly peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field, before a paper describing this work is published in a journal, conference proceedings or as a book.
Peer Review
Predatory Publishing • Predatory open-access publishing is an exploitative open-access academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals (open access or not).
Predatory Publishing
Beall's List Of Predatory Publishers • Potential predatory scholarly open-access publishers • https://beallslist.weebly.com/