We have developed a web page that enables you to check whether a journal is recognized by these organizations, rather than having to go to the individual web sites of each organization. The URL to access our web page is https://predatory-publishing.com/ISSNCheck/?issn=1234-5678.
Predatory publishers and journals use a variety of techniques to get you to submit your research articles to them, with one of the most common being unsolicited emails, often praising your previous work, then requesting that you to submit to their journal.
This article looks at their techniques and what you can do about it.
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.
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.
The first predatory journal was the Journal of Biological Sciences, which was first published by ANSInet in January 2001. To arrive at this conclusion the 18 publishers that were analyzed by Jeffrey Beall in four papers that he published between 2009 and 2012 were considered. These 18 publishers were publishing 1,328 journals when Beall carried out his analysis.
Predatory publishing is the practice of publishers/journals charging fees to publish scientific articles, yet not providing the services that would normally be expected of a scientific journal. This includes not having robust peer review, thus not ensuring the quality and integrity of the papers which will form part of the scientific archive.
In 2010, Jeffrey Beall established a blog which listed what he believed were predatory journals and publishers. Beall’s List became the “go to” place for anybody who wished to know whether the journal they were planning to submit to was predatory or not. He started the list in 2010, but took it offline, without notice, in 2017, after coming under pressure from publishers, his peers and his own institution. Although the list was criticized, many saw it as a valuable resource and were sorry to see it go.
We expect scientific publishers to follow certain standards. This is especially important in order to maintain the integrity of the scientific archive.
In this article, we touch upon three elements and question whether a predatory publisher is able to uphold these principles.
In this article we put a spotlight on, Beall, J. 2009. Bentham Open. The Charleston Advisor 11(1) 29-32. This paper was the first paper by Jeffrey Beall to discuss predatory publishing. In the paper, he analyzes the publisher Bentham Open which, at the time, published 236 journals.