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.
Open Access was seen as a new publishing model, but it does come with some challenges.
We also consider whether subject databases could help even wider dissemination.
On this platform, we often say (things like) “we run the risk of the scientific archive becoming infected”, but what does this actually mean?
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.
We believe that there are about 15,000 predatory journals, although, it is quite a difficult question to answer; as we explore in this article.
“I am in a bit of a tough situation. I agreed to submit my paper to a publisher and now found out they are charging huge fees and are predatory. I have signed something with them and they are making me either pay and publish or pay a huge withdrawal fee.”
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.
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.
Why do predatory and vanity academic publishers and conferences exist? Why are they flourishing now? And what can they tell us about the failings of academia?
This article presents an email discussion in its entirety. The journal involved is probably a predatory journal, though we have not carried out a full investigation.