Scholarly Communications: Predatory Open Access

Predatory Publishers - Jeffrey Beall at the University of Colorado at Denver, has developed a list of "Predatory Publishers” -  open-access publishers that have questionable reputations. For more information on how the publishers were evaluated, see: Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers.

Predatory' Online Journals Lure Scholars Who Are Eager to Publish - the article describes the hidden danger of open access publications.

Predatory Publishers | Peer to Peer Review - a brief overview of predatory access practices and a critique on Jeffrey Beall's work.

Investigating Journals: The Dark Side of Publishing - this article talks about predatory publishers and includes a short list of criteria for evaluating journals.

The term "predatory open access" was conceived by University of Colorado Denver librarian and researcher Jeffrey Beall.

Characteristics of predatory publishing

Complaints that are associated with predatory open access publishing include

• 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.

Many new publishers and journals have been developed during the past 5-10 years to take advantage of scholars who want to publish their work in open access journals. Some of these “predatory” publishers have set up journals to earn money rather than advance scholarship. Before deciding to publish an article in an open access journal, it is important to evaluate the publisher.  Below are some helpful suggestions to keep in mind when evaluating publishers:

Is the publisher on Jeffrey Beall's Predatory Publishers list? 

Is the publisher's or journal's web site well-written or are there obvious grammatical and spelling errors? While some publishers give an address in the United States or Europe, the language used on the web site may not conform to proper English-language usage.

What do you find when you search for information about the publisher on the Web? A search for some publisher names and the word complaint, fraud, scam, rip-off or similar terms sometimes yields blog postings or other complaints about the publisher. Some predatory open access publishers even have poor ratings from the Better Business Bureau!

Where is the journal indexed?  If articles in a journal can only be found by using a search engine (e.g. Google Scholar), it may be difficult for other researchers to find your article.

Does the journal state that it is affiliated with a scholarly organization, society or university? Look up that organization or university to see if they actually exist. 

Who is on the editorial board? Contact one of the editorial board members to ask about the journal and their experience and/or affiliation with it. According to the Chronicle article “In some cases, faculty members say they were named to editorial boards without their consent.”

If a journal states that it is affiliated with a university, check the university’s web site. Does that university offer a major in that field? Just as some members of journal editorial boards may not have given permission for their name to be used, a university that is listed as an affiliate may or may not have given permission for its name to be used on that journal's web site. If a university does not have a major in the journal's discipline, it may not have given permission for its name to be used on the journal's web site.

Look at the articles published in several issues of a journal:

• Are the articles written by a number of different authors or are there a number of articles by a single author? One journal from a predatory publisher had 4 articles in the current (and only) issue, three of which had been written by the same author.
• Do you know any of the authors? If so, contact them to find out why they chose that journal. If not, check to see what other articles they have written by searching for their name in a subject index or database. If you cannot find any other articles they have written, try searching for them in Google Scholar or Google.

Look at the articles that have been published in your field. Do they make any sense? Some articles in open access journals were clearly written by novices who have no expertise in a particular subject area.

What is the nature of the journal’s peer review process? Are authors asked to suggest names of potential reviewers or does the editor identify and choose potential peer reviewers (blind peer review)?   Some questionable journal publishers asks authors to suggest potential reviewers.  Ideally, to avoid bias, peer review should be blind -- the author should not know the names of reviewers.

Credit:  http://wiu.libguides.com/content.php?pid=158522&sid=2950614