We often get requests for help, including (but not limited to):
- “Is [put in a journal name] predatory?“
- “How can I stop the emails from predatory journals?“
- “Can you help my research project?“
- “Can you give me all the data you have?“
- “Can I have your complete list of predatory journals/publishers“
- “I am being harassed for payment, what should I do?“
- …and many more.
We appreciate the interaction that we receive and we would love to provide a bespoke service to anybody that asks for it, but that is just not possible. In fact we even struggle to respond to all emails, Twitter direct messages and the other ways that people communicate with us.
If you want our help on predatory publishing related issues there are various ways we try to do this. This article provides details of how we can assist you and, in many cases, why we cannot. We also hope to provide some pointers as to what you can do if you have one of the more common questions, without having to rely on us.
Below, we discuss some of the common questions we get and explain why we cannot always respond in the way you might expect/need. We also suggest ways that you might be able to answer the questions you have yourself.
We also provide some information about what we do with the communications messages that we receive.
EMAIL is not the best way to contact us
We have an email address (admin@predatory-publishing.com). This is our generic email address and anybody can send us an email using that address.
The majority of emails we receive are spam emails that have been forwarded to us. These form the basis for our Twitter feed dedicated to snippets from emails that highlight (we hope in a generally amusing way) the ways that predatory publishers try to entice you to submit a paper. You can some examples of these snippets here.
In among all these spam emails are emails that ask us for help, some examples which have been given in our introductory remarks. The problem we have is two-fold:
- We do not check our email account very often (perhaps every two weeks, maybe even less). This is by design as we want to focus our efforts on our Twitter account and our blog, rather than continually checking (and responding) to emails.
- If we do get an email that says something like “Is [insert journal name] predatory?“, and we do get emails exactly like this, there is a huge amount of work for us to do a proper analysis and report our findings. We are also cautious about stating whether a journal is predatory or not, as this is what got Jeffery Beall into so much trouble.
We discuss topic this in more detail below.
Access to our data
A frequent request we get (either by email or Twitter Direct message) is access to all of our data. We are not really in a position to do this, for the reasons we give below.
Can you give me a list of predatory journals?
This is a common question, but we do not really store any data about journals, perhaps we should but we don’t.
If anything all the data we have, in this regard, is on our blog and our Twitter account, albeit in a very unstructured form. You are welcome to use that for any projects that you are undertaking.
We have considered trying to structure that data but it is difficult to know what to collect, how to store it and how we make it available. In any case, with the number of predatory journals in the thousands, we could only scratch the surface and, at the moment, there are better sources of this information such as Cabells (albeit a paid for service) and the original, and variants, of Beall’s List.
In the future we may try and compile a list of journals, with some indicators whether they are predatory or not, but this is a huge undertaking.
Can you provide the soundbite data?
We have been asked for a complete list of the Soundbites that we tweets about. We cannot simply give this data away as it takes us a long time to compile and, as far as we know, we are the only people that do that, at least for predatory publishing.
Each paper that we produce soundbites for probably takes (at least) 4-5 hours. At the time of writing (8 Jan 2022) we have produced soundbites for 42 papers, which have a total of 2,192 individual soundbites. This is an investment on our part of about 200 hours, or about 4 weeks work. That does not count the initial work in developing the platform (database, Twitter functionality etc.) that enables us to post them.
We have no plans to monetize this data, not even sure who we could, but we may find other uses for it which may not be possible it it were effectively in the public domain. For example, we may write a journal article at some point. Not sure what form this would take, or whether this is even a contribution to be made, but we would like to keep our options open.
Can you provide the EMAIL snippet data?
We have been asked for a complete list of the email snippets that we tweet. These snippets are drawn from emails we have received ourselves and from those that have either been forwarded to us, or have been tweeted, tagging us.
At the time of writing (8 Jan 2022) we have just over 700 email snippets in our database, with about 500 emails that people have kindly forwarded us that we still need to process.
We could make this dataset available to interested parties but the snippets have taken us a long time to collect, and process, and they are a ‘Unique Selling Point’ of our Twitter feed. It we gave the data to somebody else, we have to assume that it is now in the public domain and others could easily replicate what we are doing.
We may also write a journal article at some point. drawing on these emails (sentiment analysis?). Not sure what form this would take, or whether there is even a contribution to be made, but we would like to keep our options open.
Where do you get your images from?
This is an easier question to answer, and help with.
We use images a lot, on feeds such as our soundbites, email snippets and articles on predatory publishing.
Most of these are from services where you can get images for free. They provide exceptional images by really talented photographers. The services we most often use are.
If you are looking for images, we highly recommend these photographic services.
You may note that we credit the images that we use, so if you want to see/use the same image then you should be able to easily find it.
Some of the photographs we have taken ourselves. Not many to be honest but we hope to increase the number of images that we produce in the future. If you would like to contribute any images, please let us know.
Why can't I comment on your blog posts
You may have noticed, we know some people have, that you cannot comment on our blog posts. This is a conscious decision on our part, for the following reasons.
- Blog posts attract spam and although there are tools to control it, these tools cannot capture all spam and it still requires some work to look regularly at each post to see if the comments are valid.
As well as capturing spam, valid comments could be marked as spam, which means we have to mark them as valid, which all takes time.
We could moderate all comments, but this takes time which, frankly we do not have. - Predatory publishing is a controversial topic and is likely to attract views which not everybody agrees with. This could lead to a lot of confrontation, which means that we may to act as a mediator, which is not a role we want to play.
So, rightly or wrongly, we have decided not to allow comments on our posts. We may change this in the future but we would need, we believe, a dedicated moderator who is able to manage the various comments and even respond on our behalf.
If you supported us a patron, it may help us move forward on having even more interaction with the community.
What about comments on Twitter
Earlier we said that we do not allow comments on our blog posts, giving the reasons why. It is a natural question to ask, “So what about comments on Twitter?” We would respond as follows.
- We don’t believe that we can stop comments on Twitter. If somebody comments, we can delete it (we have never done this (as as 8 Jan 2022)) but cannot stop people making that comment in the first place.
- When people comment on Twitter, you know their Twitter handle, so you have some information who is making the comment. Commenting on blog posts is a lot easier to hide your identity. It’s not impossible on Twitter but more difficult.
- We often tag people/publishers, even predatory publishers, and we have not yet had a war of words on a Tweet. Sometimes, we wish we would, to further raise the profile of predatory publishing, but this has not happened yet.
So, for all these reasons, we are happy (at the moment) to allow comments on our tweets, without having to moderate them.
How can we actually help?
The above may sound as if we cannot help, or are reluctant to do so. This is not the case and we provide some ways that we can help. In doing so, we try to help as many people as possible, even if just one person reached out to us.
Ask the community
We are not the only experts on predatory publishing, indeed we would not even classify ourselves as experts. There are many other people and organisations out there who are much more expert than ourselves.
Reach out to them. If you want to ask a question, tag us on Twitter (using @fake_journals) and we’ll respond (if we can), retweet it, tag people who we think might be able to help etc.
We are also thinking of setting up a Forum, but this requires time and other resources. This is one way that you could help us by becoming a patron (see below).
Is this journal a predatory journal?
This is the question we get asked the most.
We look at the obvious things such as editorial board, claims of impact factors that are not true, Article Processing Charges (APCs) which are not easy to find, look/feel of the web site, how submissions are made (email or some other system), how regularly the journal publishes, are there any statistics on time from submission to publication etc. and we try and respond to the person that asked the question.
We nearly always ask what the view of the person is who asked the question. Almost invariably, they do not have a view which suggests to us (perhaps unfairly) that they have fired off a quick email, rather than carrying out any background checks themselves.
We do make a note of the journal and may investigate it later but, generally, we do not discuss specific journals on our blog. We realize that the audience is limited if we report on a given journal and the effort involved in doing a full analysis probably does not give a return on investment for either us or the readership of the blog.
- Analysing a journal: An example
- How do you identify a non-predatory journal?
- How to spot a fake journal | A case study
You might also want to look at a specific article we wrote titled Is this a legitimate journal? How we respond
The best advice we can give you is to do some cursory checks yourself, and ask trusted (perhaps more experienced colleagues) and if there are any doubts about the journal just look for another one.
Is this publisher a predatory journal?
This is a similar question to asking if a journal is predatory, but it is a much better question as the answer provides much more information.
To answer this question means looking at a lot of journals, as many as possible, from a given publisher. The more you can identify as predatory, means that your overall conclusion will be stronger. It is probably true to say that if a publisher publishes one predatory journal, then the other journals it publishes are also predatory.
However, frustratingly, this is not always the case. There are some publishers that, arguably, publish some predatory journals and some journals which are not considered predatory. There is an argument that these publishers started off as predatory and are now trying to become legitimate by transitioning their journals.
There is an interesting 2021 article:
with a response from the publisher:
which demonstrates the issues around identifying, and validating predatory publishers/journals.
If you have doubts about a publishers, the best advice we can give you is to do some checks yourself. You need to understand why you want to ask about a particular publisher as it will not be the same as asking about a journal (which typically is because you are thinking of submitting a paper).
As an example, we have collected a lot of journal data from a publisher’s web site so that we could analyze it for a journal article. This is a different question to asking about a single journal.
With regard to our future plans, if we were ever going to produce a list of predatory journals, we would probably do it at the publisher level, rather than at the level of individual journals.
Can you help with a research project?
This is not a frequent question but we have had a couple of requests to participate in research projects. This could mean participating in a survey or providing data to help support the research.
We invariably decline (sorry). This is for several reasons.
The main reason is that we are currently remaining anonymous. We have stated that we will reveal who we are once we reach 10,000 Twitter followers. This is an arbitrary figure but we have set it at that figure, as we had to choose some way of deciding when we would make it known who we are and we decided on 10,000 followers.
Why did we do this? Essentially, its due to the problems that Jeffrey Beall had and we hope to avoid that by being anonymous until we have some traction and, we hope, some validation from the community.
Aligned with that we are also cautious about definitely labeling journals as being predatory. We want to show an evidence based approach along with just reporting facts.
Anyway, we digress. Another reason why we decline to participate in research projects is simply lack of time. We not only have to maintain this web site, keep the Twitter feed topped up and develop new content. We also have day jobs and our own research to do.
If you want help with a research project, then we are probably not the people to ask, at least not at the moment. This might change in the future but for now we are likely to politely decline and we hope you can understand, and appreciate, why we have to say this.
There is a way to get our attention
We hope that our blog and Twitter account helps you, even if we are unable to give an individual service that some might find useful.
Please do not stop contacting us as we do read every comment, request and question even if we cannot respond individually.
There is one way to get our attention and to get an individual response. That is by becoming a patron.
If you are able to support us, you can access the services we only provide to our patrons. For example, each month you can ask us to carry out a journal or publisher review. This will be done for you and we will send it to you before we use it for any other purposes.
We will also send you a newsletter and give you advance information about some of the the things we have planned.
Of course, if you support us, then this is of great benefit to us. We can use your support to progress some of the projects which are only ideas at the moment.
If you can afford a small contribution each month, then please consider becoming a patron. If that is not possible, we fully understand and we hope that the services that we do provide are still of use to you.
Final Remarks
We hope that you find the above information useful and we will update it as our situation changes and we are able to provide more information and/or services.
The other reason we wrote this article is so that we can point people to it who ask for our help so that, perhaps, they can find a way to access the information that they require and, at least, understand why we cannot provide the personal service that they were looking for.
