In this article we address a question for which we have no answer. We are hoping that you can help us solve it.
We have become aware of a Facebook post seeking co-authors for a paper. Yet, we think, we think the paper was published almost a year earlier. We cannot really work out what is happening.
We seek your help in answering this question.
If you are interested in this aspect of predatory publishing (if we can call it that), we wrote a previous article we addressed a similar issue to that discussed in this article.
The Facebook post
Figure 1 shows a Facebook post (if you click on the link, you may not be able to see the post as you have to be a member of the group to view posts), in the Facebook Group called “Journals Indexed in Scopus/ Thomson Reuters“.
We would draw your attention to three points.
This post was made on 4 December 2021 (green highlight).
It is offering opportunities for collaboration in a Scopus Q3 journal (red highlight). From the author “positions” after each journal title it looks as if they are offering (we assume for a fee) the possibility of being an author on that paper.
The main focus of this article is the sixth article (yellow highlight).
We go into more detail of each of these points below.
Figure 1: Facebook post: Cal for authors
The paper we found
Given that the Facebook post was made at the start of December 2021, and we are writing this article in the middle of February 2022, it seemed natural to see if the paper had been published already, and then to see what conclusions, if any, we could draw (for example, how many authors there were, did any of the authors come from those who had expressed an interest to the Facebook post).
We searched for the paper title and found this paper (see Figure 2), which you can access via DOI 10.12973/eu-jer.10.1.497.
Figure 2: Paper from European Journal of Educational Research
The Journal
Before we look at the paper, let’s look at the journal, just for completeness.
The journal is the European Journal of Education Research, which is published by the Eurasian Society of Educational Research, which is based in the USA.
Looking at their archives, the journal has been published since 2012.
It has indexed by Scopus since 2018.
Figure 3 shows the information about this journal, as reported by Scopus (left hand side) and the information from the journal’s home page (right hand side). You’ll see that it has an SJR impact factor of 0.319 and is in Quartile 3.
Figure 3: Scopus details: European Journal of Educational Research
Our Comments
Given the information we have presented above, we have the following observations, comments and questions.
The titles of the two papers (Journal: “The Implementation of Mathematics Comic through Contextual Teaching and Learning to Improve Critical Thinking Ability and Character“, Facebook post: “Implementation of Mathematics Comic through Contextual Method to Improve Critical Thinking Skill“) looks too close to be coincidental. At least we think so. Perhaps we are wrong and the Facebook post is referring to a different paper, in a different journal. Maybe, time will tell but, at the moment, we think that the two papers are the same.
It is telling that the Facebook post refers to a Scopus Q3 journal, which the European Journal of Educational Research is. This provides further support, albeit not definitive, that it is referring to the same journal.
There are two things that we do not understand. The first is (assuming we are referring to the same paper) is why was the paper published in January 2021 (see Figure 2), yet the call for authors is put out in December 2021 (see Figure 1)? Does anybody have any answer to that question?
The second thing we do not understand is, how the authors positions are “sold”? The Facebook post mentions that positions 1-5 are available. We are unsure how this works. Does anybody have any insights that they could share with us, particularly how this “scheme” works in the general sense, rather than just this specific example.
Finally, even if the two papers (Facebook post and the published paper) are unrelated, we still question the legitimacy and the ethics behind the calls for authors that we can see in Figure 1. We would welcome any comments/views you have. Let us know in the comments.
Disclaimers
We need to point out, that we are not making any accusations, insinuations or drawing any negative conclusions about the authors of the paper shown in Figure 2. They published a paper, in a Scopus journal in January 2021 and we do nothing but congratulate them.
Similarly, we are not painting the journal in any negative light. They have published a paper and we have no reason to believe that anything untoward has taken place.
What we do question is the Facebook post (Figure 1). Even if that Facebook post is not related in any way to article shown in Figure 2, there are still questions that need to be answered about this parctise.
Final Remark
If you have any comments on this post, please make your view known in the comments section. We do moderate comments, for (we hope) obvious reasons, so any comments you make may take a little while to appear.
A Facebook group is offering the opportunity to be an author of a paper, if you pay a fee. In this article we present what we have found, but there are still a lot of questions that need answering.
In this article we look at the Facebook group, from where the post came, an example post that has been made in this group and a paper that was published which, we believe, is the paper that is being referred to in the post. We also provide some of our own comments.
If you follow the above link, you will be taken to the group. You have to be a member to see their posts. We note that the group has over 40,000 members, which suggests that it is quite easy to join so, if you want to see the type of posts that are made in this group, it should be easy to join.
Figure 1: The Facebook group "Journals Indexed in Scopus / Thomson Reuters (Wos):
The Facebook post
We were recently made aware of the Facebook post shown in Figure 2, that was posted in the group that we mention above (see Figure 1). The link for the post is https://www.facebook.com/groups/1997039280603383/posts/2646346535672651/, but you have be a member of the group to view the post.
Figure 2: Facebook post, calling for collaboration
Figure 2 shows a call for collaboration. It’s not totally clear what is being offered, but it looks like that there are three papers that are being written and there are positions available in the author list for anybody that is interested. We assume that there would need to be a monetary exchange at some point.
Figure 3 shows some of the comments on this post.
Figure 3: Comments on the Facebook post
What strikes us about these comments is that the original poster quickly wants to get you to use DM (Direct Message) rather than post any further information in the public forum.
Not just on this post, but others that also appear in this group, if you ask what journal the paper will appear in, or ask anything about costs, you are asked to go to DM, or email. We have not found any posts where this type of information is provided.
We can only assume that this is not to show too much information, not to put people off with any financial information or to start a meaningful dialogue. Perhaps it is also aimed at collecting information that can be used to contact people later when other opportunities present themselves.
The resultant paper
Figure 4: The paper that was published
We have searched for some of the paper titles that are being advertised in this Facebook group. Most of them do not return a search result, at least not one that is conclusive. Perhaps this is because the title of the papers is purposefully mangled to stop people searching. Of course, it could be that the paper is never published.
However, some do return results that are interesting.
If you look at Figure 1, you can see that we have highlighted the first paper that is being offered as a collaborative opportunity. If you search for this paper, you can find a paper has been published with a very similar name in the Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies. You can access the paper (“CALLing the process of writing”: Facebook as language support learning tool in enhancing the EFL learners’ online writing performance) here.
You’ll see that the paper that was advertised in Figure 1 was titled:
Facebook as language support learning tool in enhancing the EFL learners’ online writing performance
The paper that was actually published was titled:
“CALLing the process of writing”: Facebook as language support learning tool in enhancing the EFL learners’ online writing performance
… apart from the additional words at that start of the title, they are identical. This suggests (to us anyway) that the paper that was advertised on the Facebook group was duly published.
Any other evidence?
Apart from the paper title, what else can we we say about the paper paper referred to in Figure 1, that suggests it is the paper that was subsequently published (see Figure 4).
Timeline
You’ll see from Figure 2 that the Facebook post was made on 16 October 2021. Figure 4 shows that the paper was accepted on the 12 November 2021. We would suggest that this timeline works for the Facebook post and the resultant paper, if they are referring to the same paper.
It is also interesting to note that the paper was submitted 07 September 2021, suggesting that the paper was submitted, then additional authors were sought and these added when a revision of the paper was submitted. At least that is our interpretation. It would be very interesting to see the audit trail of the review process for this paper but I suspect that we would not be able (allowed) to access this. But, if the editorial staff of the journal are reading this, we would value their comments on this interpretation. Let us know at admin@predatory-publishing.com.
Scopus Quartile
You’ll note from Figure 1 that the journal is stated as being a Scopus Q2 journal. If you look up the Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, on Scopus, it appears in three categories, Language and Linguistics, Linguistics and Language and Education.
Looking at the journals in the Language and Linguistics category (see Figure 5), we that there are 1,075 journals in this category, with the Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies being ranked 499, thus placing it in the second quartile (Q2).
Figure 5: Scopus percentile of the Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
Another check we did was look at the journal’s web site. This had an image that says that the SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) is 0.17 and that the journal is in the second quartile (Q2). This is shown on the right hand side of Figure 6. We can validate this by looking at Scopus (see left hand side of Figure 6). This also shows that the SJR of the journal is 0.17, which matches with the information on the web site.
Figure 6: SJR and quartile of the Journal of Language and Linguistics Studies
Summary
I think we have enough evidence to show that the paper that was “advertised” in Figure 1 is the same paper that was published a month or so later. If you disagree, let us know (admin@predatory-publishing.com).
Our Comments
Given what we have said above, we make the following comments/observations:
We note (see Figure 1) that the Facebook post is seeking author ranks for positions 5, 6, 7 and 8. In the paper that was published there were five authors listed. Can we conclude that the fifth author paid to be on the paper and that they failed to attract authors for positions 6, 7 and 8? In fact, we cannot make that conclusion, without further evidence. It would also be unfair on the fifth author who has not had the right of reply (see comment 4). Therefore, unless we have more information, I do not think we can draw any firm conclusions.
If this paper was submitted on 07 September 2021 (see Figure 4) and the Facebook post was posted on 16 October 2021, it would suggest that there was no authors in position 5, 6, 7 and 8 (noting what we said above about not wanting to be unfair to the fifth author). If we assume (and it is a big assumption) that the paper was submitted with only four authors, what was the process to add another author at a later stage?
Given what we have said above, it would be very interesting to see the full review process of this paper. That is the various submissions and the reviewers comments. We do not expect the journal to release this information but it could be a way to show that the Facebook post was not successful in what it was trying to do. If the journal wants to let us have sight of this information, we invite them to contact us at admin@predatory-publishing.com. We will respect the confidentiality of the information that is provided.
It is quite possible that the journal, and the authors of the paper, are totally oblivious to this Facebook post and what it may suggest. It would be interesting to hear from the editors and or the authors (admin@predatory-publishing.com).
Times Higher Education article
Whilst researching this article, we can across a very interesting, and recent, article that was published by Jack Grove, in the Times Higher Education. The article is very relevant to this article.
The article, “Academic fraud factories are booming, warns plagiarism sleuth” can be seen here and is based on the work of Anna Abalkina.
Let us know your experiences
If you have had experience with this type of publishing, we would like to hear from you. Please contact us at admin@predatory-publishing.com.
On this platform, we often say (things like) “we run the risk of the scientific archive becoming infected”, but what does this actually mean?
Essentially, it means that the legitimate scientific literature is citing papers that have been published in predatory journals. Or, to put it another way, papers that have been subject to robust peer review are citing papers that have been published in a journal which has not been subject to a level of peer review that we would normally expect.
In this article we provide a single example simply to demonstrate what we mean by “infecting the scientific archive.”
We identify two journals. One is a (probable) predatory journal that has published a paper – many in fact, but we focus on just one. The other journal is a legitimate journal.
We show that the legitimate journal has cited a paper that was published in the predatory journal. This is what we mean when we say that the scientific archive is being infected.
Cereal Research Communications
Figure 1: Details (from Scopus) of Cereal Research Communications
Cereal Research Communications is the journal that has cited a paper from a (suspected) predatory journal. We are not purposefully highlighting this journal. It was just the first example that we found when planning this article.
The journal has been publishing since 1973. At the time of writing (January 2022), the journal has just completed publishing volume 49 (2021) and, we assume, will publish the first issue of volume 50 in March 2022.
Figure 2: Scopus impact factor of Cereal Research Communications
The journal is indexed in Scopus (since 1993), with a current Cite Score of 1.4. This is calculated by the journal publishing 266 articles between 2017 – 2020, which were cited 378 times in the same period (see Figure 2).
The journal is also indexed in Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (see Figure 3) (commonly called Web of Knowledge, Web of Science or ISI). It has been indexed since 2000 and has a current impact factor of 0.850.
We believe that the Cereal Research Communications is a high quality, legitimate journal. We base this on the observation that it is indexed in both Scopus and Web of Knowledge and has been published since 1973.
Figure 3: Cereal Research Communications, Web of Knowledge impact factor
Advances in Crop Science and Technology
Advances in Crop Science and Technology is published by OMICS. We mention the publisher as OMICS was the publisher that was ordered to pay $50 million by the Federal Trade Commission for (and we quote from the web site)
“… that they made deceptive claims about the nature of their conferences and publications, and hid steep publication fees. The court ruling resolved a 2016 Commission complaint alleging that Gedela and the companies falsely advertised online scientific and medical academic journals and international conferences, and deceptively claimed the journals provided authors with rigorous peer review and editorial boards comprised of prominent academics.”
The journal is not indexed in Scopus or Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (i.e. Web of Knowledge, Web of Science, ISI). This is not necessarily a bad thing. There are many “good” journals that are not indexed in these databases, but it does add to the body of evidence that this particular journal is predatory.
Given the court ruling and that the journal is not indexed in Scopus or Web of Knowledge, we believe that this journal can be classified as predatory.
Why choose this journal?
Figure 4: Advances in Crop Science and Technology Google Scholar page
The reason that we were drawn to this journal is because we were looking at their web site and it had a link to their Google Scholar profile (see Figure 4). This showed, at the time of writing (January 2022), the journal had attracted 2,178 citations, had an h-index of 22 and its top cited paper had received 92 citations.
Based on this, we decided to look more closely at this journal, starting with their most cited article.
The cited article
The article we are considering, that was published in a (probably) predatory journal is this one:
T. Abebe, S. Alamerew, L Tulu (2017). Genetic variability, heritability and genetic advance for yield and its related traits in rainfed lowland rice (Oryza sativa L.) genotypes at Fogera and Pawe, Ethiopia. Advances in Crop Science and Technology, 5(2),272. DOI:10.4172/2329-8863.1000272
This is the journals most cited paper (as of 24 Jan 2022) according to Google Scholar (see Figure 4).
The citing article
The article that cited the above article in the (probably) predatory journal is this one:
Bassuony, N.N., Zsembeli, J. (2021) Inheritance of some flag leaf and yield characteristics by half-diallel analysis in rice crops (Oryza Sativa L.). Cereal Research Communications 49, 503–510. DOI: 10.1007/s42976-020-00115-z
Figure 5 shows the article, along with some of its references, including the reference to the article that we believe has been published in a predatory journal.
Figure 5: Example of a paper that is citing an article that has been published in a predatory journal
Comment
The purpose of this article is not to draw attention to any one article; either predatory or legitimate. Rather, it is to show, by way of a simple example what we mean when we say “this could lead to the scientific archive becoming infected.”
The dangers of this happening are many. For example, it could provide (undeserved) legitimacy to a predatory journal, if the predatory journal has not been peer reviewed then the legitimate journal may be basing some of its research assumptions on a paper which is not scientific valid and if this happens a lot, then we will eventually lose confidence in the entire scientific archive.
How much has the scientific archive been infected?
That is a really difficult question to answer and, to our knowledge, nobody knows.
It would be really useful to have a much larger study to see the scale to which the scientific archive has already been infected.
One the challenges in doing such a study is classifying journals as being predatory or legitimate, which is the challenge that we all face and why this platform exists.
Final Remarks
We have purposefully only shown one example, as the purpose is to clearly show what we mean by the term “infecting the scientific archive” but we hope that you can imagine this on a larger scale and the detrimental effect it has on the scientific archive.
This web site has a mission to eliminate predatory journals and publishers. It is challenging task as there are more than 15,000 predatory journals and the revenue they earn their publishers can be counted in the millions of US dollars.
But what is so bad about predatory journals? In this article we provide a few thoughts. It is certainly not a complete list, but we feel that the comments we make are important.
Predatory journals infect the scientific archive
If a paper is published in a predatory journal, it is unlikely to have been robustly peer reviewed, if reviewed at all. This means that anybody, or any organisation, can publish anything and have it form part of the scientific archive. This is problematic for a number of reasons.
Others may cite the papers that have been published in predatory journals, assuming that they are based on sound scientific procedures, when in fact nothing in the paper has been reviewed or verified.
Researchers might use a predatory paper as a basis for their own research (standing on the shoulder of giants, and all that). They are actually wasting their time as the basis for their research assumptions would be invalid if they had been drawn from a predatory journal.
Commercial organisations could publish research, which they later use in their marketing campaigns. The general public are being duped if this is done. Indeed, it could even endanger the general public.
Researchers will add papers they publish in predatory journals to their CV. Promotion and employment panels may not realise that the research that is being presented is invalid and should be ignored.
The main issue though is that as these predatory papers are published, and get cited in legitimate journals, the scientific archive can no longer be trusted. The hundreds of years that we have been developing the scientific archive could be lost in a couple of decades and we may have to start again, or at least carry out a huge task of tidying it up.
We will emphasise that, as a scholar, your legacy is your CV and it will eventually come to light that you have been publishing in predatory journals. This might be after your death but if you consistently publish in predatory journals, your reputation, and legacy as a researcher, will eventually evaporate and you will be remembered for the wrong reasons, rather than being somebody who published in legitimate, high quality journals who made a contribution to the advancement of science.
Predatory journals takes money away from research
We would love to see some validated figures as to what the predatory publishing sector is worth, in terms of the revenue that it generates.
The truth is nobody really knows what this sector is worth. It’s not as if we can go and get audited accounts from the publishers and do the calculations. The nature of predatory publishing is that their operations are opaque, they try and hide in the shadows and they want to operate behind anonymous email accounts, hide where their offices are, or even which countries they are operating from.
So, with all the warnings about calculating the size of the predatory publishing sector, in terms of revenue, what can we say about that revenue and what else it could be used for?
What is most likely missing out is funding research. Imagine if the hundreds of millions of dollars that are paid to predatory publishers could be used to fund research. Not only would it enable more research to be done but it would also provide an opportunity for researchers to access funding for their research. Moreover, it could employ a lot more people into academia sector, whether that is more PhD students, post-doctoral researchers or permanent members of staff.
Having more research carried out, or employing more people, to do more research, seems to be a much better use of the money that giving it to predatory publishers.
Final Remarks
We feel that is incumbent on the legitimate side of the academic sector to make a stance against predatory journals. Not only to stop the scientific archive being infected but also to ensure that money is spent in the right way, supporting scientific endeavors, rather than supporting predatory publishing. This is even more important when tax-payers money is being used as the funding source, which is often the case.
This stand against predatory publishers is also the responsibility of individual researchers, if nothing else to protect the quality of the CV, but also to protect the scientific archive which is something we all rely on.
There have been a number of papers published in 2021, which have focused on predatory publishing. If you search on Scopus (search carried out 20 Dec 2021), of the 294 papers returned by searching for “Predatory Publishing” (the quotes are part of the search), 66 were published in 2021. Some of these articles have received more citations that the others and it is these that we focus on.
This list might also be useful to those who are planning to write a paper about predatory publishing. It may be a good starting point for a literature review. Indeed, if you are a student working on a project, dissertation of thesis, this list might be a good starting point or, at least, some of the first papers who may want to read.
Methodology
We used Scopus as the the source of data. We searched for all papers, using the search term ‘predatory publishing‘ (the quotes are part of the search term).
The data was collected on 20 December 2021. Given that this is just a snapshot, at a single point in time, we will update this list at sometime in the future. This is not only because we are not quite at the end of 2021 (at the time of writing) but, over time, the number of citations will change and we would like to document these changes, as this may be of interest to some people/researchers.
Top 20 "Predatory Publishing" papers from 2021
Macháček V., Srholec M. (2021) RETRACTED ARTICLE: Predatory publishing in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences, Scientometrics, 126(3):1897-1921 DOI:10.1007/s11192-020-03852-4 (Citations: 14)
Krawczyk F., Kulczycki E. (2021) How is open access accused of being predatory? The impact of Beall's lists of predatory journals on academic publishing, Journal of Academic Librarianship, 47(2) DOI:10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102271 (Citations: 10)
West J.D., Bergstrom C.T. (2021) Misinformation in and about science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(15) DOI:10.1073/pnas.1912444117 (Citations: 9)
Mills D., Inouye K. (2021) Problematizing ‘predatory publishing’: A systematic review of factors shaping publishing motives, decisions, and experiences, Learned Publishing, 34(2):89-104 DOI:10.1002/leap.1325 (Citations: 8)
Deora H., Tripathi M., Chaurasia B., Grotenhuis J.A. (2021) Avoiding predatory publishing for early career neurosurgeons: what should you know before you submit?, Acta Neurochirurgica, 163(1) DOI:10.1007/s00701-020-04546-9 (Citations: 8)
Kendall G. (2021) Beall's legacy in the battle against predatory publishers, Learned Publishing, 34(3):379-388 DOI:10.1002/leap.1374 (Citations: 5)
Tsigaris P., Teixeira da Silva J.A. (2021) Why blacklists are not reliable: A theoretical framework, Journal of Academic Librarianship, 47(1) DOI:10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102266 (Citations: 5)
Gurnani B., Kaur K. (2021) Avoiding predatory publishing for early-career ophthalmologists, Indian Journal of Ophthalmology, 69(12):3719-3725 DOI:10.4103/ijo.IJO_1639_21 (Citations: 3)
Inouye K., Mills D. (2021) Fear of the academic fake? Journal editorials and the amplification of the 'predatory publishing' discourse, Learned Publishing, 34(3):396-406 DOI:10.1002/leap.1377 (Citations: 3)
Teixeira da Silva J.A., Vuong Q.-H. (2021) The right to refuse unwanted citations: rethinking the culture of science around the citation, Scientometrics, 126(6):5355-5360 DOI:10.1007/s11192-021-03960-9 (Citations: 3)
Teixeira da Silva J.A. (2021) Conflicts of interest arising from simultaneous service by editors of competing journals or publishers, Publications, 9(1):1-10 DOI:10.3390/publications9010006 (Citations: 3)
Bakri S.J., Shah S.M. (2021) Predatory Publishing in Ophthalmology: A Call for Awareness and Action, American Journal of Ophthalmology, 221():207-210 DOI:10.1016/j.ajo.2020.08.009 (Citations: 3)
Munn Z., Barker T., Stern C., Pollock D., Ross-White A., Klugar M., Wiechula R., Aromataris E., Shamseer L. (2021) Should i include studies from "predatory" journals in a systematic review? Interim guidance for systematic reviewers, JBI Evidence Synthesis, 19(8):1915-1923 DOI:10.11124/JBIES-21-00138 (Citations: 2)
Mertkan S., Onurkan Aliusta G., Suphi N. (2021) Knowledge production on predatory publishing: A systematic review, Learned Publishing, 34(3):407-413 DOI:10.1002/leap.1380 (Citations: 2)
McKenzie M., Nickerson D., Ball C.G. (2021) Predatory publishing solicitation: A review of a single surgeon's inbox and implications for information technology resources at an organizational level, Canadian Journal of Surgery, 64(3):E351-E357 DOI:10.1503/cjs.003020 (Citations: 2)
Marina T., Sterligov I. (2021) Prevalence of potentially predatory publishing in Scopus on the country level, Scientometrics, 126(6):5019-5077 DOI:10.1007/s11192-021-03899-x (Citations: 2)
Tsigaris P., Teixeira da Silva J.A. (2021) Bibliometric analysis of a controversial paper on predatory publishing, Performance Measurement and Metrics, 22(1):39-47 DOI:10.1108/PMM-03-2020-0015 (Citations: 2)
Macháček V., Srholec M. (2021) Retraction Note to: Predatory publishing in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences (Scientometrics, (2021), 126, 3, (1897-1921), 10.1007/s11192-020-03852-4), Scientometrics, DOI:10.1007/s11192-021-04149-w (Citations: 2)
Allen R.M. (2021) When peril responds to plague: predatory journal engagement with COVID-19, Library Hi Tech, 39(3):746-760 DOI:10.1108/LHT-01-2021-0011 (Citations: 2)
Van Den Berg R., Nezami N., Nguyen V., Sicklick J.K., Weiss C.R. (2021) A solution to academic radiology's experience with solicitation e-mails from predatory journals, American Journal of Roentgenology, 216(1):233-240 DOI:10.2214/AJR.20.22923 (Citations: 2)
We recently ran a survey asking if an acknowledgement is required if somebody proof reads your paper. The results revealed that 55.6% said that no acknowledgement is required, with 44.4% saying that an acknowledge should be provided. However, these results come with some caveats, which we explore in this article.
The survey
The question we posed was:
“If somebody uses a proof reading service (which might include adding refs, changing the structure, correcting grammar etc.) do you think they should acknowledge this in the paper, on the basis that the reader/employer/supervisor has a right to know that they received help?“
The answers that could be chosen were “Yes acknowledgement reqd.” and “No need to acknowledgement“.
The survey ran for about seven days (11th August 2021 to 18th August 2021).
Figure 1 shows the survey as presented on Twitter.
Figure 1: Survey as presented on Twitter
Survey results
The survey attracted 36 responses, with 16 people (44.4%) saying that that an acknowledgement is required 20 people (55.6%) saying that there is no need to acknowledge. These results can be seen in Figure 2. The Twitter result can also be seen here.
Figure 2: Results of Twitter survey
Comments on the survey
We provide our thoughts on the survey below.
Survey size
We recognize that a survey size of 36 people is not that large, so we have to bear that in mind when drawing any conclusions.
Survey demographics
In any survey, it is important that we draw our responses from the right demographics. This is often a random set of people from a given subset of the population.
In this survey, this was not possible for a number of reasons.
Firstly, those that participate in the survey are those that follow (or see) our Twitter account. This means that they have an interest in predatory publishing and do not represent the entire scholarly population which, ideally, is where we would like to draw our respondents from.
Secondly, both those that answered yes and no could have ulterior reasons for answering that way. For example, we could have got responses from those that charge for these services and would prefer not to be acknowledged. We could have got responses from supervisors who would prefer their students to acknowledge them.
Thirdly, we could have got duplicate responses from the same person who have more than one Twitter account.
For these reasons, we cannot take the survey too seriously, or at least draw any concrete conclusions.
Survey question
We know that the question was not ideally worded. You can only say so much on a Twitter survey.
However, in hindsight, we should have made the question a little clearer. There is a difference between ONLY proof reading paper, when compared to restructuring, adding references etc. We may run another survey, sometime in the future, where the question will be a little more targeted.
What do we think?
Now the survey is over, we can give our view.
If a proof reader (service provider, whatever you want to call them) does anything above and beyond simply proof reading then we believe that the person(s) who helped should be acknowledged, if not be an author, if the contribution is enough to warrant it.
We also believe that if an author employs a proof reader, then that should be acknowledged. Our argument is that the person reading the paper has the right to know if the author (especially in the case of single authored papers) received help. It is not so much for the scientific/technical/contribution elements of the paper (the reviewers should see to that) but it is for potential employers, promotion panels etc. where the people looking at the paper have an interest whether the person can write good English, rather than having to have it corrected by somebody else, possibly using a paid service.
Figure 3: Is There a Role for Publication Consultants and How Should Their Contribution be Recognized?
“Readers of academic papers have the right to know who contributed to the paper, whether this is by the list of authors, by the acknowledgments or by the work that is cited. Any help, not represented by the list of authors, should be acknowledged. This is often done by recognizing the funding agency, the efforts of colleagues, software providers etc. This acknowledgment should also extend to publication consultancy services, where assistance has been provided, albeit via a paid for service.“
We thought we would see what others thought.
Twitter Comments
As this poll was running it got a few comments. We have shown some of these below. You can see them on the Twitter post, but this just saves you having to click through to Twitter.
“I think if you’re being evaluated on the things the service provides, then supervisor/employer should be informed. Otherwise a brief acknowledgment of assistance is nice/thoughtful/completist, but it’s absence IMO wouldn’t be ethically disqualifying.“
“If the proof-reading would suggest me in the comments to change structure or add some references, I would acknowledge that.“
“I think there is no immediate answer here. Just proof-reading or correcting grammar needs no acknowledgment if done on a contractual basis, but adding references, changing the structure, etc., is a different thing. And this is not the proof-reader’s job either.“
“Agreed (sortof), the problem arises when it goes beyond proof reading. We say sortof as does a reader not have the right to know if the author can write fluent English if (say) they were looking at the paper for a job application?“
“I would say no when it comes to academic papers (but yes for jobs, even though an interview would help sort out the matter in extremis). Otherwise you are placing native speakers at an implicit advantage. After all, as a reader, why would I care about who did the language edit?“
“An editor doesn’t usually get credit for a novel or other work of literature. Many editors when have a policy that they do not want to be mentioned.“
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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.
When looking back through the scientific record, it often useful to have access to the seminal work. When we write a paper, we always try and note where a particular research area started as we feel that it is important to recognize the pioneers, upon which everything that follows is built upon.
In some of the articles we have written on this site, we have often referred to the open access movement, as this is the movement that predatory publishers and journals rely upon. If you are unsure what open access means, take a look at our article “What is Open Access Publishing? | Is it a good model?“
We assumed that it would be easy to find out which was the first open access journal. In fact, it was not as easy as we thought, but we believe that we have tracked it down.
In this article we let you know how we arrived at that conclusion, but we are more than happy to be corrected, as we would like to be sure that we have the definitive answer to the question posed in this article.
Firstly, we we look at some of the early work on open access, reporting some of the initiatives that were instrumental in the open access movement, with some believing that the open access movement would not be where it is today without these initiatives.
Then we describe how we tracked down, what we believe, to be the first open access journal.
However, this is not a complete history of open access. We’ll save that for another article.
Early References
If you search for either the history of open access publishing or for the first open access journal, there are a number of things that quickly become apparent. These are important milestones in the history of open access, but do not answer the question posed in this article. However, they are worth noting and we briefly discuss them here for completeness.
arXiv
Pronounced archive (the X represents the Greek letter chi), this service was introduced in in August 1991, by Paul Ginsparg. He recognized the need for a central repository for pre-prints of papers, which were then available for others to download. Many see this is one of the key moments in the history of open access, for example see this article on the “History of the Open Access Movement.”
Being 1991, the access methods were initially limited but others were soon added, including FTP in 1991, Gopher in 1992 and the Word Wide Web in 1993. The term e-print was used to describe these articles and that term has remained in use ever since.
ArXiv is still available today. If you take a look at its web site, you can see that it holds getting close to two million articles (we accessed the web site on 25 Oct 2020) and it covers a variety of topics, as can be seen by this quote taken from its web site.
“arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 1,782,389 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.“
In our experience, arXiv is used a lot these days for scholars to stake a claim on an idea as they know that to polish a paper, submit it and get the results of peer review can take a lot of time and they would like to have a record of what they were working on.
Putting a paper on arXiv also means that others can cite the paper, which also helps the researcher’s profile and, ultimately, the impact of their research.
One word of caution, when we review papers and see that there are references to arXiv we also note that these papers have not been peer reviewed, so whilst it is okay to cite them now (as part of the peer review process), they should either be replaced with a peer reviewed version in the final, or removed altogether.
SciELO
The aim of SciELO is to help with the scientific communication within developing countries, providing a way for those countries to increase the visibility of their research and make it easier to access their scientific literature.
Originally established in Brazil in 1997, there are now 14 countries in the network (last accessed 25 Oct 2020); these being Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, Spain and Uruguay.
“Open access has long emphasized access to scholarly materials. However, open access can also mean access to the means of producing visible and recognized journals. This issue is particularly important in developing and emergent countries. The SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library On-line) project, first started in Brazil and, shortly afterward, in Chile, offers a prime example of how this form of access to publishing was achieved and how open access in the traditional sense was incorporated within it. Open access has allowed more visibility, transparency, and credibility for the SciELO journals that now span over a dozen countries, three continents, and more than 600 titles. Conversely, SciELO incarnates the most successful and impressive example of gold OA, that is, open access based on publishing rather than self-archiving; at the same time, its database acts like an open-access depository.“
This sums up the origins of SciELO, along with its aims and its progress to date. If you want to know more about SciELO, we would recommend that you take a look at this paper.
The First Open Access Journal
As we said in the opening it was not easy to track down the first open access journal and, to be honest, we are still not convinced that we done that. However, below we talk through some of the resources we accessed, along with the conclusion we arrived at.
Open Access Directory: Timeline
There is a really great resource, called the Open Access Directory, which is a set of lists that covers many areas of open access that you might find useful. Of particular interest was a timeline list, especially the page for pre-2000.
New Horizons in Adult Education
Figure 1: Edited screen shot from the Open Access Directory timeline, showing the first journal. Access full page here.
The earliest journal we can see in the Open Access Directory (OAD) timeline is New Horizons in Adult Education. Unfortunately, the link shown on the OAD page no longer works (accessed on 25 Oct 2020). Just for the record, it was trying to access http://www.nova.edu/~aed/newhorizons.html, but that led to a “404” error (i.e page not found).
New Horizons in Adult Education & Human Resource Development
Figure 2: Screen shot after after searching for New Horizons in Adult Education and finding New Horizons in Adult Education& Human Resource Development
We searched for the New Horizons in Adult Education journal and found a journal published by Wiley (see Figure 2), but with a slightly different name (New Horizons in Adult Education & Human Resource Development). It says that it was first published in Fall 1987, which agrees with the date given in Figure 1.
We have also found other evidence that these two journals are the same entity. Much of this evidence is based on the following article we located.
Hugo, Jane and Linda Newell. (1991) New Horizons in Adult Education:The First Five Years (1987-1991)The Public-Access ComputerSystems Review 2(1), 77-90
Here is the evidence that leads us to believe that it is the same journal.
Figure 3: Screenshot from New Horizons in Adult Education& Human Resource Development, showing two articles that are referred to in Hugo, 1991.
As we said above, both journals started publishing in the the Fall of 1987.
In the Hugo, 1991 article, it says that the second editor (1989-1990) of New Horizons in Adult Education was Jane Hugo, who was one of the authors of the article that reviewed the first five years (Hugo, 1991). Whilst not being conclusive evidence, it is suggestive that the two journals are the same, or at lest connected through a former editor.
The first editor (Michael Ehringhaus (1987-1990) is also mentioned in the survey article and we can see this editor appearing in the journal in 1989 (see the left hand side of Figure 3), when writing from the editor’s desk.
The Hugo, 1991 paper mentions a editorial policy that was published in New Horizons in Adult Education. Specifically it says “The editorial policy guidelines, published in the third issue (Fall 1989) of New Horizons …” Looking at the right hand side of Figure 3, you can see that an editorial policy was published in October 1989, with this entry being taken from Wiley’s web site for New Horizons in Adult Education& Human Resource Development.
We believe that this provides conclusive evidence that the journal New Horizons in Adult Education was started in the Fall of 1987 is the same journal that is now named New Horizons in Adult Education& Human Resource Development.
At some point the original journal was acquired by Wiley and, perhaps at the same time, was renamed New Horizons in Adult Education& Human Resource Development. We could dig even deeper and look at the individual articles and work out when the change took place, which would provide even more evidence.
We did not do this as it would take some time, and we feel that the evidence above is conclusive enough for what we require. Moreover, the articles are now behind a firewall so, although the journal may have started out as open access, this is no longer the case and even those papers that were published back as far as the late 80’s, they are still subject to the reader paying (or having some sort of subscription).
We note that this goes against the spirit of open access where, once something is in the public domain, it should remain there. Perhaps, we are missing something but it does seem perverse that a journal which is a candidate for being labelled as the first open accessed journal now sits behind a paywall.
Learned Publishing
We found a very useful resource:
Crawford W. (2002) Free Electronic Refereed Journals: Getting Past the Arc of Enthusiasm. Learned Publishing, 15, 117-123. DOI: 10.1087/09531510252848881
The abstract of this article reads:
“Do free electronic refereed journals represent one viable alternative to overpriced commercial journals? This informal study looked at 104 titles listed in the 1995 Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists (published by the Association of Research Libraries) as being free, journals, and refereed. Taking five years of continuing publication as an initial sign of reasonable longevity (later raised to six years), the record shows reasonable promise. While quite a few early journals succumbed to the ‘arc of enthusiasm’, more than half are still publishing.“
This looked like a good paper to ascertain the first open access journal. Of interest to our discussion is the statement that appears in the body of the paper.
“The Association of Research Libraries’ (ARLs’) Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists for 1995 includes 104 items that appear to be free, refereed, scholarly electronic journals.“
Crawford goes on to say that some journals started before 1995, were typically distributed by email, or other non-web distribution methods. In the rest of the article, Crawford recounts his experiences in tracking down the journals, as far as he could. Of the 104 journals, 86 were available as free and 49 of those were publishing six years after 1995, so still publishing in 2000.
In the context of this article, the most useful part of Crawford’s article is the list of journals that he has been able to track down. This includes when it started publishing.
By inspecting this list (and searching by years, gradually going backwards in time), we can only find one journal that was first published in 1987, with none being found for any earlier years (see Figure 4).
Flora Online
From the above investigations/discussions we have reached the conclusion that Flora Online was the first open access journal. We note that New Horizons in Adult Education also appeared in 1987, but this was in the Fall (October), whereas Flora Online first appeared on 12 January 1987.
We have managed to track down an archive of the journal, which agrees with the entry by Crawford (Figure 4) that it started in January 1987 and was closed down in 1993.
In case you are interested, here are some key facts about this journal.
Flora Online was first published on 12 January 1987.
The last issue was published on 8 November 1993.
The journal was established by Richard H. Zander.
The journal was the first online journal to receive an ISSN number from the Library of Congress: ISSN 0892-9106.
Flora Online published 29 issues, but if you add up the issues shown in Figure 4, it totals 30. Looking at the archive, there seems to be some ambiguity with issue 22, which has an entry for 11 December 1989 and an entry for 5 December 1990.
Conclusion
We have found a journal (Flora Online) that we believe is the first open access journal. It dates back to 12 January 1987. We may be wrong and we would be delighted if somebody would like to correct us.
If we can arrive at an agreement, backed by evidence, of the first open access journal, then we can all cite it, in the knowledge that it is accepted as that by others in the scientific community.
Many argue that the world’s research, that is predominantly funded by governments, using tax payers money, should be freely available to the general public, as they are paying for it. The open access model of publishing papers seeks to address this.
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.
Many scientific papers (although the number is decreasing) are behind paywalls, meaning that somebody who wants to read the paper either has to have a subscription or pay a fee to buy, or rent, the paper.
In gold open access the author (or a another stakeholder) pays for the paper to be published and the final version of the paper is freely available to anybody who wishes to access it.
In a green open access model, a submitted version of the paper can be made available online. This version is typically the final version of the paper before it is typeset by the publisher.
In this article we look at the history of open access, take a closer look at the differences between gold and green open access and consider some of the criticisms of open access.
You might also be interested in the Sherpa Romeo tool, which we also touch on in this article.
History of Open Access Publishing
The emergence of the internet was obviously a driver in the open access movement and some might assume that open access emerged due to the internet. In fact, this is not the case. Open access publishing can be dated as far back as the 1940’s when physicist Leo Szilard suggested, in order to stem the flow of low quality publications, that each scholar should be given 100 vouchers to pay for his papers (we would like to find a citation to this quote – please let us know if you know it).
The internet was, of course, important in the development of open access. It made it possible to publish online, make articles instantly accessible and reduce the cost of entry by (for example) not having to have printing and distribution costs. Of course, these are also true of traditional publishing but it is easier to start a new journal and have it fully online, rather than change your existing model, which might meet resistance from the stakeholders and may even been seen as lowering the quality of the journal.
Open Access Declarations
In the 2002/2003, there were three initiatives, statements and declarations that attempted to define what open access is. These have been called the three B’s (for Budapest, Bethesda and Berlin) of open access.
Below we look at each of these, providing links to the full initiative, statement and declaration should you want more information.
Budapest Open Access Initiative
Budapest Open Access Initiative, read the full article here, last accessed 22 Oct 2020
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) was a public statement of open access that was released on 14 February 2002. You can read the full statement here. This is one of the first times, if not the first, that the term open access was used, although there had been previous attempts to make research outputs more accessible.
Essentially, this initiative says that open access should enable scientific literatureto be freely accessible online in a way that scholars give it to the world without expectation of payment. It also notes that the research should be free to read, but it is not a no cost model, but the overall costs should be far lower than the more traditional dissemination models.
Given that BOAI was released in 2002, it was a bold ambition. Whether the BOAI has achieved its aims, we hope, will be the subject of another article we are planning.
Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, read the full article here, last accessed 22 Oct 2020
This statement was made following a meeting, attended by 24 people, held on 11 April 2003, with the statement being formally released on 20 June 2003. A key element of the statement is the way that it defines an open access publication. This is what they say:
An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:
The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, read the full declaration here, last accessed 22 Oct 2020
The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was published on the 22 October 2003. It is an international statement on open access and access to knowledge, following a conference at the Max Planck Society, in Berlin. The conference was attended by more than 120 cultural and political organizations from across the world.
The declaration, similar to the Bethesda Statement, defines an open access using two key points. The full declaration can be read here, but we reproduce the definition of an open access contribution below:
Establishing open access as a worthwhile procedure ideally requires the active commitment of each and every individual producer of scientific knowledge and holder of cultural heritage. Open access contributions include original scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material.
Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving.
Publishing Models
In this section, some of the common publishing models are presented and discussed.
Traditional Model of Publishing
In a traditional publishing model, publishers publish papers and charges readers who wish to read the paper. The author does not pay to publish their article.
To read an article, payment can be done in a number of ways:
Institutional Subscription: This is the most common model. Institutions subscribe to certain journals, or to a selection of journals from a certain publisher and then provides access to their employees. Access can either be granted via an IP system (so the publisher knows you are accessing the content from within the institution’s domain), or it may provide access via a login system, which confirms that you are affiliated with the institution. To many people, this type of access will be almost seamless. So much so that they may not think about the underlying costs which will depend on which journals you subscribe to and how many people you want to give access to.
Individual subscription: Individuals can subscribe to a specific journal, or to a selection of journals from a publisher. In effect, this is the same model as an individual subscribing to a newspaper or a magazine.
Buy/Rent: If you do not wish to subscribe to a journal, but would still like to read a specific paper, you can buy that individual article, or even rent it, which gives you access for a certain amount of time.
The traditional model of publishing is still very much in existence and exists alongside open access models. In fact, many journals, run the two models side-by-side, so the authors decide whether to publish a given article using the traditional model or to publish it using one of the open access models.
So, for any given journal, there could be articles that are behind a pay wall (i.e. those that are published using the traditional model, or a green open access model) and those that are free to access (i.e. those that are published using a gold open access model).
Gold Open Access Model
In the gold open access model, once the paper is published, it is freely accessible by anybody who wishes to read it.
Apart from the underlying financial model, the author should have an identical experience to submitting to a traditional journal. For example, there should be a robust peer review process which is equivalent to what you would expect from a traditional journal. A publisher that is publishing an open access article would typeset the article to its journal’s standards and also ensure that the article becomes part of the scientific archive.
If you want to read more about this, take a look at our article entitled “Do predatory publishers respect the scientific archive?“, which provides our view on what we expect from scientific publishers and, as the title suggests, predatory journals fails to respect.
There is a perception that the gold open access model means that the “author” pays; and by author we mean the author, their institution, a research funding agency or some other stakeholder. However, this is not necessarily true. There have been studies. For example, Publication Fees for Open Access Journals: Different Disciplines—Different Methods, which showed that of the 9,000 journals included in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), only 28% charged authors for publishing in their journals. It is noted that the DOAJ does not represent all open access journals, but it is felt that the 9,000 (in 2013) journals do provide a good insight into the issue of Article Processing Charges. It is also noted that the data stored by DOAJ should be treated with some caution as journals and publishers do not have to ensure that it is updated when changes occur.
Green Open Access Model
In green open access, as far as the publisher is concerned, you are publishing using the traditional model. That is, the paper is ultimately published behind a paywall and those wishing to read it require a subscription of some sort to access the full paper.
The difference is that the author is allowed to make a version of the article freely available. This is unlikely to be the typeset article, as that will behind the publisher’s paywall. The version that can be made freely available is often the final, camera ready version that it submitted once all the reviewer’s have been addressed.
Where you can place the article may also be subject to certain conditions. You may be able to put the article on a personal web site or it may have to be placed on an institutional repository.
Different publishers/journals will have different conditions and it can be quite difficult to check. Fortunately, there is a tool that can help. Sherpa Romeo, which we discuss below, enables you to check the requirements for a journal through a single portal.
Comments
Whether you publish through a traditional publishing route or through an open access model, to the author, it should look exactly the same as far as the processes are concerned. The ONLY differences are that you may have pay at some point and the paper will not be behind a firewall.
Sherpa Romeo
Sherpa Romeo is a free service that enables you to check on the open access policies of various journals. Its home page does good job of summarizing what it does:
“Sherpa Romeo is an online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis.“
All you need do is provide the journal name, or its ISSN, and you can see the open access policies of that journal. Just, by way of example, we looked up the Journal of Forensic Nursing. This is what the result looks like.
You can see that it lists various versions. Associated with each version are a set of conditions, which you can see by clicking on the + symbol. This will give you information about what funding agencies this version applies to, if there is an embargo (which you can actually see by looking at the hour glass icon) and the repository where you can post the paper to (e.g. an institutional repository).
It not worth us going through every option that Sherpa Romeo provides as they vary by the publication and you would be better advised to explore this web site using a journal that you are familiar with.
We should just add that you can also search by publisher, being able to find all the journals that they publish, and then look you can look up that journal to find out the details of the open access policies.
Criticisms of Open Access Publishing
Open access provides access to scientific papers to anybody that wishes to read them. At first sight this seems to be a laudable aim and it might be assumed that there could be few criticisms to this goal.
However, there are some arguments, or at least concerns, against the open access model.
The Role of the Tax Payer
Research is (generally) funded by the general public, through their taxes. The argument follows that the same general public should be able to access the research results that their taxes funded.
One criticism of this model is that tax payers money is being used to fund the research and then used again to publish the results of that research. By this we mean that when a scholar applies for research funding from an agency that is essentially funded by the tax payer, they will apply for funds to conduct the research and they will also apply for funds to publish that research, by seeking funds for the Article Processing Charges (APCs’).
There is an argument that not every tax payer will want to access scientific papers, so why should everybody pay? Moreover, the majority of those who do want access to the papers will be able to get that access through an institutional subscription. The few people that are left, who want to access the paper, should be expected to pay on the basis that this would be a net saving to the tax payer.
We are using the term tax payer here in a global context. Some might argue that research that is funded by the USA (for example) tax payer, it is only US citizens that should be able to freely access those results. But good luck policing that, especially when you have US citizens, who are paying US taxes, but they live in a different country.
The Rise of Predatory Journals
It is arguably the rise of open access publishing that gave rise to predatory journals. There is a not a direct correlation, as we can trace open access publishing back to the late 1980’s (see our article “What was the First Open Access Journal?“, if you are interested in seeing some of the history of open access publishing), with predatory journals being a more recent phenomena, only starting to appear in 2001. Our article “What was the first predatory journal? | Who published it?” provides more information on this, if you are interested.
Given that the first open access journals appeared as early as 1987, yet predatory journals did not appear until much later, it is not right to say that open access was responsible for predatory journals. It is true to say that, predatory journals could not exist without the open access model. In our article “What is Predatory Publishing? | … and should you care?“, as well as describing what predatory publishing is, there is also a section on how the number of predatory journals has risen in recent years. We won’t repeat that information here but, suffice to say, the number of predatory journals has increased in recent years, and there is no sign that it is slowing down.
In our view, the real catalyst of predatory journals was the open access model and the ability to manage a scientific journal through an online platform. As the scientific world put more content online, managed its editorial processes via an online platform and relied less on having to distribute hard copy volumes, this opened the door to predatory journals who could exploit the open access model, whilst operating solely online.
Conflict of interest
One of the criticisms of predatory journals is that they are more financially motivated, rather than having to respect the scientific archive.
The same concerns could be made of open access journals. Given that accepting a paper directly adds to the bottom line, as it will result in a payment from the author (or the relevant stakeholder).
In the traditional publishing model, the financial income comes through subscriptions or downloads. Accepting (or not) one particular paper does not necessarily add to the bottom line. There is, arguably, a better balance between the financial motivations and the need to respect the scientific archive in the traditional model of publishing.
The tension to accept a paper, due to financial considerations, extends to the editors and reviewers.
We have to say that the vast majority (if not all) of legitimate open access journals find the right balance and operate in the same way that traditional publishers operate. But there will be some rogue journals out there, as exemplified by predatory journals, which are interested in nothing but a financial return.
Summary
This section has only touched upon some of the criticisms leveled at the open access movement. We are planning a more detailed article to look at this area in a little more detail.
Conclusion
There has been a gradual move towards open access publishing, using either the green model or the gold model. This is to be applauded, as it makes the world’s research available to many more people.
However, open access publishing is not without its issues. We would suggest that it is the rise of the open access movement that has led to the rise of predatory journals, with all the problems that this brings.
Open access publishing also gives rise to tensions in that some scholars will not have access to funds to pay the open access article processing charges.
It is our hope for the future that open access publishing continues to develop and a model is found that enables all research results to be freely available but this must be done in such a way that predatory publishers and journals are also eased out of the system.
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. Moreover, predatory journals may not have an editorial board. Even if they do, the members may not be recognized experts in the discipline being addressed by the journal, they may not make independent decisions and may be influenced by financial considerations.
There is no universally accepted definition of predatory publishing. There are many definitions out there, but not one which everybody agrees on.
Blog/online definitions
All the proposed definitions have their merits. For example, we cannot disagree with any of these that have appeared in blogs/online articles
“A predatory publisher is an opportunistic publishing venue that exploits the academic need to publish but offers little reward for those using their services.”
What is a predatory publisher?, IOWA State University [link]
“Predatory Journals take advantage of authors by asking them to publish for a fee without providing peer-review or editing services. Because predatory publishers do not follow the proper academic standards for publishing, they usually offer a quick turnaround on publishing a manuscript.“
What is a Predatory Journal?, The University of Texas [link]
“There is no one standard definition of what constitutes a predatory publisher but generally they are those publishers who charge a fee for the publication of material without providing the publication services an author would expect such as peer review and editing.“
Scholarly Communication, The University of Cambridge [link]
Definitions of Predatory Publishing in Peer Reviewed Papers
Some scholars have published peer reviewed papers that have offered a definition of predatory publishing.
They invited 115 people to take part in a survey, which resulted in 18 terms that should be included in the definition of predatory journals and publishers. Table 2 in the paper (which is open access, so you are able to easily view it) shows the 18 terms that were agreed as defining a predatory journal/publisher.
A Nature paper from 2019, reported a meeting between between 43 people, from 10 countries representing publishing societies, research funders, researchers, policymakers, academic institutions, libraries and patient partners. After 12 hours of discussion, they arrived at the following definition.
“Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices.“
We have attempted to come up with our own definition, which is shown at the opening of this article, but it is just another, among the many others that have been proposed.
Does it Matter not having an Accepted Definition of Predatory Publishing?
In our view, yes it does.
If we do not have a widely accepted definition of a predatory journal it makes classifying a journal as being predatory difficult. Moreover, we run the risk of arguing about the definition, rather than focusing on trying to stop predatory journals operating. This plays into the hands of the predatory publishers who can simply sit back and watch others argue about what it means to be a predatory journal, rather than having to ensure that they will not be closed down.
When was predatory publishing first highlighted?
As the opening remarks of this article say, the first mention of predatory publishing, although not using the term, was in a 2008 blog post by Gunther Eysenbach. A 2010 article in Nature, by Katharine Sanderson, also highlighted the issue. Following this Jeffrey Beall took up challenge and published a number of articles, and also introduced the term predatory publishing.
In the next two sub-sections, we look at the contribution of Eysenbach and Sanderson. Following this, we focus on Jeffrey Beall’s early contributions.
Gunther Eysenbach’s Blog
Figure 1: Gunther Eysenbach blog post which first highlighted predatory publishing
The earliest reference that we can find to predatory publishing is a blog post by Gunther Eysenbach on 8 Mar 2008, titled Black sheep among Open Access Journals and Publishers. Gunther does not use the term predatory publishing. This term was introduced by Jeffrey Beall, as we discuss later in this article.
In his blog post Gunther says that he has seen an increase in the number of spam emails he receives from publishers asking him to submit to their open access journal. He highlights one particular journal (Bentham Open) which, over a two month period, sent him 11 emails. The emails were seeking submissions to different journals from their 200+ portfolio. They were keen to recognize his eminence and they pointed out that their institution, or a research grant, would probably pay their modest open access fees.
If you have the time, we would encourage you to read Eysenbach blog post, or at least have a quick glance through it. It was written more than 10 years ago but the concerns raised by Eysenbach are still very much issues today. The only difference seems to be that the problem is now very much worse, with, alas, no sign of getting better.
Katharine Sanderson’s Nature Paper
Figure 2: Sanderson K. (2010) Two new journals copy old, Nature, 463, 148
In January 2010, Katharine Sanderson published a paper in Nature entitled Two new journals copy the old. The papers opens as follows:
“At least two journals recently launched by the same publisher have duplicated papers online that had been published elsewhere.“
The article focuses on the publisher Scientific Research Publishing, which still operates today. In its journal, the Journal of Modern Physics, it reproduced two papers from the New Journal of Physics (DOI:10.1088/1367-2630/2/1/331 and DOI:10.1088/1367-2630/2/1/323). The Journal of Modern Physics said that this was a mistake due to it posting sample content on the journal’s web pages and the content was removed.
Other notable quotes from Sanderson’s article include:
“The Scientific Research journal Psychology also contains papers that seem to have been published previously, including one in its first issue that was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 after being published elsewhere.“
“The home page for the Journal of Biophysical Chemistry contains only the titles and page numbers of four papers in the first issue. Identical paper titles appear in the Journal of Bioscience, published by Springer India, from 2000.“
We should note that Sanderson’s paper was published in 2010 and we are not saying that Scientific Research Publishing is operating these practices today. Indeed, we take no view whether they are a predatory publisher or not. To ascertain that, would require further investigation, which is not the purpose of this article.
Beall’s First Papers
Jeffrey Beall was an academic librarian at the University of Colorado who was instrumental in highlighting the issues of predatory publishing.
Beall’s first paper, highlighting predatory publishing
Four of Beall’s early papers, which addressed predatory publishing, were published in The Charleston Advisor. Each of these papers highlighted, and analysed, a number of publishers. Of the 18 publishers analysed, all but one was categorized as predatory.
These four articles, all published in The Charleston Advisor, analyzed 18 publishers,which published 1,328 journals. Beall categorized them all as being predatory publishers, with the exception of AOSIS Open Journals.
Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers and Journals
You cannot talk about predatory publishing without mentioning Beall’s List. Indeed, it is arguable that without Beall’s List, along with the papers that Jeffrey Beall wrote on this topic, that predatory publishing would have received the attention that it has.
Beall’s List is such an intrinsic part of predatory publishing, we have devoted a separate article to it. This article tells you when the list was set up, when it was taken of line, why it was taken down and some of the criticisms leveled at the list.
Is the number of predatory journals increasing?
One of the challenges in trying to monitor predatory journals is that there is no universally agreed way to categorize a predatory journal. As such, there is no robust way to monitor if they are on the increase or decline, although we should be able to look at general trends and draw some conclusions.
In the next two sub-sections, we consider Beall’s List and papers from the scientific archive, which have both provided a viewpoint as to how many predatory journals there are.
Beall’s List
The challenge of categorizing journals is illustrated in Beall’s List where the decision whether a journal was predatory was made by one person and there was sometimes disagreement whether a journal should be on the list or not, often with representation from the journal itself. It is arguably, for this reason, that the journal was taken offline, largely due to the objection from Frontiers (read more here).
In our article which looked at Beall’s list, we note that the number of predatory publishers on the list in 2011 was 18, rising to 1,115 in 2017. The number of predatory standalone journals was 126 in 2013, rising to 1,294 in 2017. The graphs in our article show the steep rise in the number of journals that Beall classified as predatory.
We may argue about some of the journals on Beall’s List, but we believe that the evidence provided by Beall shows that the number of predatory journals and publishers rose between 2011 and 2017. Either that or they were there all the time and Beall only discovered them over the years he was maintaining Beall’s List. If we wanted a definitive answer to this question, we would need to look at when the journals published their first issue. We do not believe that this work has been done or, at least, it has not been reported in one place. It would actually be an interesting study.
“Over the studied period, 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.“
Figure 3 (taken from the article, under CC BY 4.0) shows the increase in the number of predatory journals, with a rise from under 2,000 journals in 2010 to around 8,000 in 2014. The figure also shows the statistics for publishers who publish a different numbers of journals.
Figure 4 (also taken from the same article, under CC BY 4.0) shows the number of predatory articles that were published between 2010 and 2014, showing a rise from about 53,000 articles in 2010 to about 420,000 articles in 2014. Similar to Figure 3, there are also statistics breaking down the figures based on the number of journals a publisher produces.
If we accept that predatory journals exist, should we care? Why not just ignore them, and hope they go away? It may not be as easy as that.
Here are four reasons why you should care about predatory journals. We have provided a link to some of our other articles, where we believe that this might be useful.
Damaging the integrity of the scientific archive: If papers that have not been properly peer reviewed are allowed to get into the scientific archive, then it damages the archive in a number of ways, including:
The results that are being claimed may not be correct.
The reported results may not be reproducible.
The findings in the paper may simply be a work of fiction.
Others may rely on the results and try to develop them further, which is likely to be futile.
The scientific archive is a trusted resource. If that trust is broken it could bring the entire archive into question.
The results from the predatory papers may be used to advertise products to the general public. Indeed, to do this, might be the motivation to publish the paper.
Cost to the tax payer: A lot of research is funded by the tax payer, with the funds being distributed by research funding agencies. If some of that money is used to pay the article processing charges to predatory publishers/journals this is a waste of tax payers money which could be used for other research and/or other services that would benefit the general public.
Damage to your CV: If your CV is littered with papers published in predatory journals, or even if you have only published one or two, this will have a negative effect on your CV. It may get you another job, it may get you promotion but ultimately your CV will be judged for what it is.
Lack of Impact: Papers which you publish in predatory journals are unlikely to get the attention that you might get if you published your paper in a non-predatory journal. This is due to many reasons, including:
The journals are not so well known, so are unlikely to be the “go to” place for those looking for a paper to cite.
Predatory journals tend to be very broad, so it may be difficult to find a paper in your discipline, among the many others which have nothing to do with your discipline.
Even if your paper is well written and is underpinned by robust research, it is likely to be among papers which are not of the same quality. As a result, your paper could be ignored in the belief that the journal doe snot publish high quality papers that are worth citing.
Predatory journals are unlikely to be indexed by the major bibliographic databases (such as Web of Science and Scopus), so may not be on the radar of researchers who rely on those databases as their main source of references.
Predatory publishers exploit the open access model of publishing by charging a fee to publish scientific articles. However, they lack the services that you would normally expect from a scientific publisher, most importantly a robust peer review process. This results in papers being entered into the scientific archive which have not been peer reviewed to the standards that we would normally expect.
Predatory publishing has been around since around 2000, but only started to attract the attention of critics in about 2008. Since then, there have been many studies, with only a small sample being mentioned in this article, but our other blog articles will reference more studies if you are interested.
Both Beall’s List and peer reviewed papers have shown the significant rise in the number of predatory publishers and journals in recent years. Unfortunately, unless we are missing something, there is not a recent study so it is hard to gauge if this increase is continuing. It would certainly be useful if somebody produced an updated study.
Part of the problem is that there is no widely accepted definition of predatory publishers. Most of the definitions that are provided are quite similar and the scientific community would benefit from converging to one definition, so that the community can focus on tackling the problem of predatory journals, rather than trying to come up with a definition which classifies what a predatory journal is.
Predatory publishing should be of concern to all researchers that would like to be able to rely on the scientific archive. Researchers with any integrity should be opposed to predatory journals and publishers and should do what they can to eliminate them from the research community.
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As scholars, who publish scientific papers, we often hear the term “ISSN”, but what does it mean, do you need one, how do you get one and what assumptions can you make about an ISSN? In this article, we explore these questions.
An ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) uniquely identifies all types of print and electronic media, such as scientific journals, magazines and newspapers. It is important that it is a periodical. An ISSN is represented by an eight-digit code, often separated in the middle by a hyphen. The digits that make up the ISSN have no meaning in themselves, they just have to be unique from all other ISSNs.
Why do ISSNs exist?
In many aspects of life, we need to be able to uniquely identify something. This might be to identify you as a customer for (say) an electricity provider, for the tax office or as a member of an organisation.
It is not just individuals that need to be identified. In a warehouse each item will have an SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) and in a shop each item will have a Product Code. Even airports have a unique three-digit code so that we can differentiate one airport from another, which is very important for many areas of airport operations, not least of all making sure that our baggage gets to the right place.
Scientific publishing is no different. We have to have a way of uniquely identifying certain elements within this area of our lives. DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is one aspect, which provides a unique way to identify a paper. An ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) identifier is a way to uniquely identify a single author.
An ISSN is just another form of unique identifier, in this case it identifies some form of electronic or print media. In the context of this article, an ISSN identifies a scientific journal.
Just to be clear, an ISSN will be unique to a specific journal. It is not unknown for two journals to have the same name, or almost the same name, which is a tactic used by some predatory journals to try and trick researchers into submitting their journal. However, two journals cannot have the same ISSN; each one will be different.
The ISSN system
The ISSN system is managed by an international centre in Paris. They take responsibility for assigning ISSNs in France and also for countries that do not have their own national centre.
There is a network of more than 80 centres across the world who take responsibility for assigning ISSN’s in their respective countries.
Is there an ISSN standard?
The ISO (International Organization for Standardization, yes, we know the acronym does not match the wording) has a standard on ISSN (ISO 3297:2017) which provides a definition of an ISSN, namely “Each International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is a unique identifier for a specific serial or other continuing resource in a defined medium.“
Does a journal need an ISSN?
No, a journal does not need an ISSN.
It is perfectly okay to publish a journal, and many do, without an ISSN. This does not mean that the journal is better or worse than a journal with an ISSN, although some will try to give the impression that a journal with an ISSN has some mark of quality about it.
On the ISSN web site, it specifically says “ [an ISSN] does not guarantee the quality or validity of the contents” (see image below).
Why would you apply for an ISSN?
Having an ISSN does provide some credibility to your publication, even if that is unwarranted as ISSNs are relatively easy to get and are no measure of quality. But having an ISSN does provide a unique identifier, which may help others when searching for your publication.
As ISSN’s are for publications that are produced regularly, it also helps tie them together, so that readers know that they are reading the same periodical.
This would seem to be another good reason to get an ISSN. As they are free, there does not seem to be a downside?
What are the guidelines for requesting an ISSN?
Each country has its own guidelines but the ones we looked at are similar in the advice they offer.
You can see the guidelines produced by India at this link, but we have downloaded and made it available from this link, just in case the links stops working.
Some of the common guidelines we saw include:
ISSNs are available at no charge.
An ISSN can be revoked if it is shown that misleading information was provided at the time it was requested.
ISSNs are assigned for certain categories of print/electronic media, including serials, journals and magazines. The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) provides some information about what types of material are suitable for an ISSN. They say that “ISSN are applicable to serials and to other continuing resources, whether past, present or to be published or produced in the foreseeable future, whatever the medium of publication or production.”
Books cannot be assigned an ISSN. They require and ISBN.
In some cases you can apply for an ISSN before publication but the general rule seems to be that you either need to wait until you have proof of publication or the ISSN will not be formally assigned until you have proof that the publication exists, even if you have previously applied and have been assigned an ISSN.
For online publications, an ISSN can only be assigned after the first issue has been released.
The guidelines on journals are particularly interesting. In India, for example (but other countries have similar guidelines), they have these guidelines.
There should be a minimum of five editorial board members.
Official postal and email addresses should be provided. The emails should have an institutional domain and personal email addresses (such as Yahoo and Gmail) should be avoided.
The editorial board should be international in its make-up, with some members being from respected institutions from overseas.
An ISSN can be withdrawn if plagiarism is detected.
For non-annual e-journals, five articles is the minimum for a complete issue. Annual publications require ten articles for a complete issue.
Editorial board members should be senior faculty members. Students, research fellows etc. should be avoided.
The name and complete postal address (specifically India) of the publisher must be displayed on the publication or publication website. It is particularly important for the name of the publisher and the place of publication to be printed or displayed on the serial.
It should be noted that these guidelines apply to an application for an ISSN. Whether breaching these guidelines after the ISSN has been assigned will lead to it being revoked, we are unsure.
How do you apply for an ISSN?
It is relatively easy to get, or at least apply for, an ISSN, but it does depend on what country you are in.
If you look at the ISSN web site, specifically the area on “Requesting an ISSN”, you will be asked to provide your country. This will then link you to the country agent(s), typically with a “Contact Us” button and a “Submit Your Request” button.
At the time of writing, the UK page asked for a form to be filled in, which has to be sent to British Library. In fact, you can access this form through the ISSN web site, but you can access a similar form through the British Library itself.
If we look at another country, let’s say Australia, you will be routed to their page. This also leads to a form that has to be submitted.
So, the exact method of applying for an ISSN will different from country to country but from looking at various countries it appears to be a pretty simple, straight forward process and they generally ask for similar information.
What do the eights digits mean?
An ISSN is made up of eight digits, which are all numbers, although the last digit can be an ‘X’. This last digit is actually calculated from the other seven digits.
The only digit that has a meaning is the last one. This is known as a check digit and its role is to ensure the integrity of the other seven digits. This means that if one of the other seven digits changes, or the check digit changes, then it can be shown that there is an error in the ISSN number.
You may see the term ISSN-L, which refers to a “linking ISSN”. This is a type of ISSN that groups together different media formats of the same serial publication.
We have not seen linking ISSNs used very often. In our experience, it is more common to see a journal with a print ISSN and a separate electronic ISSN.
Displaying or printing the ISSN
The standard way to display (or print) an ISSN is:
ISSN followed by a space
The first for digits
A hyphen
The last four digits
For example, (without the quotes when displaying/printing), “ISSN 1476-4687”, which is the ISSN for the journal Nature.
Conclusion
ISSN’s are probably more applicable to publishers than they are to authors and, as an author, ISSNs can almost be ignored.
For publishers, it might be important to have an ISSN, as it provides the rest of the world some way of uniquely identifying your publication. An ISSN also comes with some credibility, even though that might not be justified.
As an author, you may not ever care about ISSNs. It may become important when you are trying to track down a specific journal. Certainly, for this web site, ISSNs are important as it can enable us to differentiate between journals, which is not always as easy as it sounds. To give another example, we have also used ISSN’s in our bibliographic databases as a way to group the same journals together as, even for the same journal, they are sometimes spelt differently.
Most people reading this article will never need to apply for an ISSN but, if you do, it is a pretty easy process and it is free.
