Predatory open access

Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. The phenomenon of "open access predatory publishers" was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in ''The Journal of Academic Librarianship''.

Predatory publishers are so regarded because scholars are tricked into publishing with them, although some authors may be aware that the journal is poor quality or even fraudulent but publish in them anyway. New scholars from developing countries are said to be especially at risk of being misled by predatory publishers. According to one study, 60% of articles published in predatory journals receive no citations over the five-year period following publication.

'' Beall's List'', a report that for 5 years was regularly updated by Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado until January 2017, set forth criteria for categorizing publications as predatory. A demand by Frontiers Media to open a misconduct case against Beall, which was launched by his university and later closed with no findings, was one of several reasons Beall may have taken his list offline, but he has not publicly shared his reasoning. After the closure, other efforts to identify predatory publishing have sprouted, such as the paywalled Cabell's blacklist, as well as other lists (some based on the original listing by Beall).

History

In March 2008, Gunther Eysenbach, publisher of an early open access journal, drew attention to what he called "black sheep among open access publishers and journals" and highlighted in his blog publishers and journals which resorted to excessive spam to attract authors and editors, criticizing in particular Bentham Science Publishers, Dove Medical Press, and Libertas Academica. In July 2008, Richard Poynder's interview series brought attention to the practices of new publishers who were "better able to exploit the opportunities of the new environment." For the series of interviews, se
The Open Access Interviews
index page. Doubts about honesty and scams in a subset of open-access journals continued to be raised in 2009.

Concerns for spamming practices from these journals prompted leading open access publishers to create the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association in 2008. In another early precedent, in 2009 the '' Improbable Research'' blog had found that Scientific Research Publishing's journals duplicated papers already published elsewhere; the case was subsequently reported in '' Nature''. In 2010, Cornell University graduate student Phil Davis (editor of the ''Scholarly Kitchen'' blog) submitted a manuscript consisting of computer-generated nonsense (using SCIgen) which was accepted for a fee (but withdrawn by the author). Predatory publishers have been reported to hold submissions hostage, refusing to allow them to be withdrawn and thereby preventing submission in another journal.

Predatory publishing does not refer to a homogeneous category of practices. The name itself was coined by American librarian Jeffrey Beall who created a list of "deceptive and fraudulent" Open Access (OA) publishers which was used as reference until withdrawn in 2017. The term has been reused since for a new for-profit database by Cabell's International. On the one hand, Beall's list as well as Cabell's International database do include truly fraudulent and deceptive OA publishers, that pretend to provide services (in particular quality peer review) which they do not implement, show fictive editorial boards and/or ISSN numbers, use dubious marketing and spamming techniques or even hijacking known titles. On the other hand, they also list journals with subpar standards of peer review and linguistic correction. The number of predatory journals thus defined has grown exponentially since 2010. The demonstration of existing unethical practices in the OA publishing industry also attracted considerable media attention.

A 2020 study has found hundreds of scientists say they have reviewed papers for journals termed ‘predatory’ — although they might not know it. An analysis of the Publons has found that it hosts at least 6,000 records of reviews for more than 1,000 predatory journals. "The researchers who review most for these titles tend to be young, inexperienced and affiliated with institutions in low-income nations in Africa and the Middle East."

Bohannon's experiment

In 2013, John Bohannon, a staff writer for the journal '' Science'' and for popular science publications, tested the open access system by submitting to a number of such journals a deeply flawed paper on the purported effect of a lichen

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases