As we have developed this web site, alongside our Twitter feed, we have tried to educate anybody who cares to read our musings about the dangers of predatory publishing.
Over the past few years, what has become is two things.
We have actually learnt far more that we have taught others. The more you immerse yourself in a topic, the more you learn. So, we set out to share what we knew but we soon realized that we had limited knowledge we have learnt more from others than we could possibly share with others.
We owe a great deal of thanks to all those that have interacted with us. Not only correcting us when we get things wrong (as we do frequently) but also sharing your knowledge and experience with us.
As we have become more exposed to predatory publishing, we have realized that this is only the tip of a very large iceberg. There are so many more facets to what we have started referring to as unethical publishing.
What do we mean by that? Unethical publishing covers a whole range of things, many of which we have not even thought about yet but we mention here citation manipulation, fake journals, paying for article writing and paying for authorships; just to give you a flavor of the areas we have in our minds.
We now wonder whether we are now focusing on the right thing (predatory publishing), or whether we should expand our vision and look at the many aspects of unethical publishing?
In fact, we know the answer. Yes, we should. The issue is, we have limited resources (both people and time) and we are worried that we would spread ourselves too thin and we would not be able to do “Unethical Publishing” justice.
We plan to ponder on this a little more but, in the meantime, we will continue to focus on predatory publishing but have a watching brief on the many examples of unethical publishing that we come across.