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Scholarly Communication, Open Access, and Publishing: PREDATORY PUBLISHING

This guide provides faculty, staff, and students information about the transformation in creating, distributing, providing access to, and preserving scholarly output within the academic community.

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

Article Processing Charges (APCs) are not an indicator of predatory practices. The most established publishers in the world often require APCs to support their hybrid (partially Open Access) publications.

Predatory Bublishing: A Definition

"Predatory journals solicit articles from researchers through practices that exploit the pressure on researchers to publish. Features of predatory journals include rapid pay-to-publish models without rigorous peer-review, fake editorial boards falsely listing respected scientists, fraudulent impact factors, journal titles that are deceptively similar to those of legitimate journals, paid review articles that promote fake science, and aggressive spam invitations to submit articles, including outside of a researcher’s expertise. Furthermore, it is common practice for predatory journals to exploit the “author-pays” model of open access for financial gain."

-Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences published by InterAcademy Partnership

Used with the kind permission of Meg Shields, Digital Services Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Lowell Library

Predatory Publishing - Things To Know

Warning Signs

Tactic How to Recognize
Solicitation
  • Suspect journals aggressively solicit scholars to submit papers.  The solicitation may come as spam or individual emails. Legitimate journals usually do not solicit authors but instead have the authors contact them.
  • The journal agrees to publish your article for a fee before reviewing it.
Peer Review
  • A claim that a journal is peer reviewed is not enough. Almost all predatory journals claim to be peer reviewed. 
  • The stated time for peer review is extremely short.
  • You are asked whom you would like to review your work. 
Impact Factors
  • Be wary of journals that cite bogus impact factors, such as the GIF ( Global Impact Factor), Index Copernicus Value, Citefactor, or the UIF (Universal Impact Factor). Some may falsify legitimate impact factors. Impact Factors can be verified via Web of Science, Dimensions or Google.
Editorial Board
  • Members of the editorial board lack qualifications in the field.
  • Different  journals by the same publisher have the same editorial board.
  • Predatory journals will sometimes  solicit well-known scholars to join their boards in order to lend credibility to their journal but don't let them make decisions. (How you would make this discovery even with good due diligence is hard to imagine.)
  • Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission and not allowing academics to resign from editorial boards.
Indexing
  • The journal is not indexed in the major indexes in the field as well as general indexes, even though it might claim to be.
  • Some journals falsely claim to be indexed by Thomson Reuters.
Watch lists
  • The journal is listed on Cabell's Predatory Journals list, or other watchlist.
Other Factors
  • The journal is difficult to locate in library catalogs, i.e. few major libraries subscribe to it.
  •  The scope is overly broad and/or does not fit well with your research.
  • Publication frequency is irregular or not stated.
  • May have the same or similar name to a legitimate journal. The former is characteristic of hijacked journals.
  • The email address is often non-professional, e.g.,  (@yahoo.com, ao.com or @gmail.com).

 

Used with the kind permission of Meg Shields, Digital Services Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Lowell Library