The publisher JScholar claims that papers that it publishes will be indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). JScholar, or the journals it publishes, are not indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals. Therefore, using the DOAJ logo on their web sites is not right.
The Scope Database web site, in some places, looks the same as the Scopus web site. As far as we can see there is no relationship between the Scope Database and Scopus and we can only conclude that Scope Database is trying to fool the unwary researcher.
We are often asked if a journal is legitimate. We can’t answer every request but we can provide some advice, which is to carry out an initial check to see if the journal is a member of COPE, DOAJ, Scopus and/or Web of Science.
We look at an email exchange, where a predatory journal reduced their Article Processing Charge (APC) from 500 USD to 150 USD, and the author never really had to ask.
But should you negotiate?
In April 2020, Bradley Allf published a paper in “US-China Education Review A.” The paper, entitled “Experiential Learning in Secondary Education Chemistry Courses: A Significant Life Experiences Framework” was totally fake, including authors on the paper being characters from the TV series Breaking bad and the paper loosely following the Breaking Bad story line.
We were recently contacted on Twitter and asked if a particular journal was a fake journal. This was an intriguing question and one which we felt we had to answer, or least look at to see if we could offer advice.
In this article we describe the investigation that we carried out.
The Global Impact Factor (GIF) ranks journals using quantitative and qualitative methodologies in order to evaluate the prestige of journals. The evaluation considers factors such as peer review, originality, quality, technical editing quality, editorial quality and regularity.
What was the first open access journal? We believe that it is Flora Online that started publishing in January 1987. The journal ceased publication in November 1993, after publishing 29 issues.
We say, “we believe” (take a look at our evidence), so if you know different, let us know.
What is Open Access Publishing? It seeks to make scientific research papers freely available to anybody who wants to read them, at no cost to the reader. There are two primary types of open access publishing – Gold Open Access and Green Open Access. These sit alongside a traditional publishing model where readers have to pay to read scientific papers.
In a 2018 paper, Serhat Kurt asked “Why do authors publish in predatory journals?” He gave four reasons given by scholars when asked why they submit to predatory journals. These were Social Identity Threat, Pressure to Publish, Lack of Awareness and Lack of Research Proficiency.
In this article, we look at each of these and what they mean.