Guidance for Researchers: Predatory Publishing

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” (Grudniewicz et al., 2019).

As a researcher, you need to ensure that you are not publishing in these journals. This will cause reputational damage to yourself and to the University. You are not alone: an Italian study found that 5% of a sample of 46,000 researchers had published in journals considered as potentially, possibly or probably predatory (Bagues et al., 2019). This amounted to 5798 articles.

43 participants 10 countries, representing publishers, funders, researchers, policymakers, academic institutions, libraries and patient partners, met in Ottawa in 2019 to agree the above definition. They also identified key characteristics of predatory publishers (Grudniewicz et al., 2019):

• They provide false and misleading information. The journal website may contain mistakes and appear unprofessional. The website may contain contradictory statements, present dubious impact factors, provide incorrect addresses, misrepresent the editorial board or their membership of professional associations, provide false claims of where the journal is indexed and provide misleading claims about the peer review process, where this is actually stated.
• They do not meet standards for scholarly publishing such as the failure to have a retraction policy, not supplying a Creative Commons licence in an open access article and requesting a transfer of copyright when publishing open access.
• They often lack transparency, failing to provide their contact information or details about article processing charges (APCs). Their editors and members of their editorial boards are often unverifiable.
• They usually send repeated emails promoting their journal’s rapid publication or inviting submissions as they are urgently needed for a forthcoming issue, regardless of whether the researcher’s expertise is within the scope of the journal.

There is some overlap with the characteristics of the journals themselves identified by Shamseer et al. (2017):

• Spelling and grammatical errors are more prevalent on the home page.
• Distorted, fuzzy, low-resolution or unauthorized images.
• Articles are submitted by emailed to the journal itself rather than through a third party system. A non-professional email address may be used.
• Less information about what happens to an article once submitted.
• Few had policies regarding retraction, correcting errors or plagiarism.
• Few had statements about the copyright of authors

Beall’s List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers originally maintained by librarian Jeffrey Beale, is a listing from 31 December 2016. The list was updated from 31 December 2021, with further publishers not on the original list but which may be considered predatory. Beale published his criteria for determining predatory open access publishers under five headings: editor and staff; business management; integrity; other; and poor journal standards and practice.

In contrast to a "bad" (in terms of predatory publishing) journal list, the GAJET List (Good Academic Journal in Ethical Terms) has claimed to present a "good" (in terms of ethical, free to read and publish) journal list, for your consideration of publication destinations. 

Check the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Up to April 2024, DOAJ indexes more than 20,300 open access journals. Journals that have a DOAJ seal have been through an application process which ensures that these titles are not considered predatory but have an editorial process and clear copyright and licensing terms. BCU Library became a DOAJ supporter, together with the funders, to help to share some of the operational costs of DOAJ, e.g. the significant increase in their workload in carrying out their expert evaluation of the growing number of journals that apply (a 59% increase in applications since 2018) and the challenge to maintain their application processing time of three months on the 8-10,000 journal applications they receive each year and to enable them to invest in efforts to keep questionable publishers out of the index. Enhanced funding will allow them to invest in supporting applications from journal editors from the global south, increasing technical and community support, improving metadata for libraries and visibility for institutional and library publishers. 

If the journal is indexed in Scopus or Web of Science, they are unlikely to be considered predatory. However, there are still a high number of citations to studies in predatory journals (see Anderson, 2019; Retraction Watch, 2020).

Check Beall’s List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers (see above).

Table 10 from Shamseer et al., 2017 identifies 13 key characteristics of potential predatory journals.

Follow advice on the Think. Check. Submit. Website.

Check the warning sign features (Table 4) from WAME.