Beware of predatory journals
Predatory journals are fraudulent journals that portray themselves as prestigious journals, tricking scholars with their false accolades and credentials. Predatory journals ask authors to pay a fee for publishing and do not provide proper peer-review or editing services. Because they do not follow proper academic standards for publishing, there is usually a quick turn around and the manuscript gets published much quicker than others.
Predatory publishing, also known as write-only publishing or deceptive publishing is an exploitative academic publishing model that usually targets new scholars from developing countries. These journals take advantage of the high demands of researchers, typically young doctorial students, to publish articles towards PhD and post-graduate assessments.
Both OA and predatory journals charge me: are they the same?
The biggest problem with predatory journals is that they sabotage the integrity of open access publishing as a whole. Many researchers, new and experienced, are misdirected into believing that all open access journals publish low-quality, unreliable, or unethical research with a lack of editorial and infrastructural rigour.
Open Access journals may require authors to publish for a fee, but maintain high standards for peer review and editing like traditional journals. Open Access journals have a greater global reach and can create a citation advantage for authors whereas nearly 60% of articles published in predatory journals receive no citations over the five-year period following publication.
Recognizing predatory journals-Beall’s list
Jeffery Beall a University of Colorado librarian maintained a prominent list of predatory open access publishers on his blog the Scholarly Open Access. Beall’s list was a document of open access publishers who published any article as long as the authors paid the open access fee, without proper peer reviews.
It was originally started as a personal endeavour in 2008, but became a widely followed piece of work by the mid-2010s. Later Beall’s list had to be taken down due to the threats he was facing, however it became the pioneer for similar lists started by others to identify predatory journals.
Here are some of the ways to recognize a predatory journal
- According to Beall’s list if a journal is indexed by JCR or/and DOAJ, then it is a very good indicator that the journal is not predatory. Some scam publishers claim that they are indexed, but it is important to go through the relevant website to check their authenticity.
- Another way to check a journals’ credibility is to research their editorial board. Often, predatory journals lists names of scholars without their permission or creates fake scholars, so it is important to further check their online professional page, LinkedIn or ReasearchGate.
- By going through past issues of the journal it is easy to identify whether they are good quality journals as they claim to be or not. Many predatory journals will publish anything and everything that is submitted to them; by going through their past publications, it is easy to identify that their editorial policies are lacking.
Think. Check. Submit. is a new campaign led by multiple publishing organisations to try and raise awareness of Predatory Journals and to help authors to think carefully before submitting their research.
Tools available to identify OA journals
There are many tools to identify open access status of journals. Some of the most common and most reputatable options are listed below.
Directory of Open Access Journals
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ; https://doaj.org/) is a non-profit organisation maintaining a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing global community. DOAJ contains more than 19,000 Open Access peer-reviewed academic journals. Apart from metadata such as subject, publisher info, peer review type, language, DOAJ also provides information about the Creative Commons (CC) License of indexed Journals.
The mission of DOAJ is to “increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language.”
Although DOAJ has been primarily used to identify open access journal titles, about forty percent of them are searchable at the article level. Journals can be browsed by title or by broad subject area. Articles are searchable by article author or title, ISSN, journal title, abstract, or key words. Full-text is not searchable but can be accessed fully. To be included in the DOAJ, the criteria is that the journals must use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access and must have gone through proper peer-review or editorial quality control.
DOAJ also provides a change log on Google Sheets that identifies the journals that were added and the journals removed with the justification for the removal.
In a 2015 comparison with MEDLINE, PubMed Central, EMBASE and SCOPUS, it has been found that DOAJ had the highest number of open access journals listed, but less than a half of them had actively published contents on DOAJ.
Journal Author Name Estimator
The Journal/Author Name Estimator (JANE; https://jane.biosemantics.org/) is a free online bibliographic journal selection tool, debuting in 2007. Journal selection tools, also known as journal matching or journal comparison tools, help authors determine the most appropriate in scope journal to publish their manuscripts.
JANE is web-based and it simple user-interface allows users to input keywords, abstract text, or author names and view related articles based on the text that is entered into the textbox.
The search boxes also includes a ‘Show extra options’ button, where users can limit results based on language, publication type (case reports, various phases of clinical trials, meta-analyses, reviews, etc.); open access journal options; and journals only indexed for PubMed Central.
The search boxes also includes options to either ‘Find journals’, ‘Find authors ‘ or ‘Find articles’. ‘Find journals’ retrieves a list of journals as per the input terms and the journals are sorted by confidence, with Eigenfactor article influence (AI) metrics displayed. A
‘Show articles’ link retrieves a list of relevant articles from each journal. Users can also select individual articles from the results list, which opens a new browser tab taking users to the full record in PubMed.
In 2017, JANE began cautioning users about potential predatory publishers. In a statement appearing on the home page, JANE notes that it relies on PubMed data, acknowledging that predatory journals can appear in PubMed and, therefore, can potentially appear in JANE search results.
In order to distinguish reputable journals from questionable ones, JANE now displays color-coded identifiers behind each journal name in the results page.
Others
Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/) is one of the best and easiest-to-use tools for finding open access versions of journal articles. If an article is freely available — on the publisher’s site, on the author’s homepage, or in a disciplinary or institutional repository — Google Scholar usually finds it.
Unpaywall, developed by a non-profit compay offers an open database of free scholarly outputs by harvesting OA contents across over 50,000 publishers, repositories, and data sources including Crossref, DOAJ, PubMed Central, and DataCite based on DOI of publications. Unpaywall offers plugin for Chrome and FireFox.
Think Check Submit Initiative
Think. Check. Submit. is an international cross-sector initiative to journal selection; it helps researchers identify trusted journals and publishers for their research. Established in 2015, DOAJ is a proud founder of Think. Check. Submit. as well as a contributing organisation and long-standing committee member.
Think. Check. Submit. provides tools, practical resources and separate checklists for journals and books to guide researchers through the key criteria for selecting where to publish their research and are also invaluable to scholarly communications professionals who are advising researchers about these issues. Translations of the checklists are also available in a number of languages.
The website is freely accessible and the toolset given is simple to follow.
Step 1 (Think): The scholar is required to answer a set of starter questions that makes them “think” about the target journal.
Step 2 (Check): Then the scholar is linked to a “check” list of criteria that every author should consider using. It contains some important questions like; for example, “Do you or your colleagues know the journal” and “Do you recognize the editorial board?”. The latter consideration may be quite telling, as it is a good way to filter out predatory journals in the selection process.
Step 3 (Submit): After answering “yes” to all the check list questions, the scholar may proceed and “submit” their paper.
Think. Check. Submit. clearly states that it does not aim to recommend any particular or set of journals to authors. Instead, the aim of this important initiative is to guide researchers in how they evaluate where to publish their work so as to improve their research impact and future career development.
UGC CARE List
UGC strongly emphasizes on promoting high quality research and knowledge contents by faculty members, researchers and students in India. To meet these goals and to ensure prevention of academic misconduct, UGC has set up the ‘Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics (CARE)’. University Grants Commission will consider the article as valid only if the author submits it in the approved list of journals.
The UGC CARE List promotes quality research, academic integrity and publication ethics in all Indian Universities. The UGC-CARE List is available on the website https://ugccare.unipune.ac.in.
The UGC CARE List 2021 is setup in two main groups; Group-I and Group-II (previously there were four groups (A, B, C & D)). Group 1 comprises of journals found qualified through UGC-CARE protocols. Group 2 consists of journals indexed in globally recognized databases.
UGC CARE Journal List Group I: In Group 1, the journals are classified into 5 major subjects wherein a total of 1456 journals are included.
| Subject | Total UGC Approved Journals 2021 |
| Sciences | 422 |
| Social Sciences | 347 |
| Arts & Humanities | 383 |
| Multidisciplinary | 56 |
| Indian Languages | 248 |
The journals submitted by Council Members and Universities would be analysed by the UGC Cell. A stringent methodology is used for analysing new titles.
The UGC-CARE List is dynamic and is updated quarterly. Both publishers and individuals can recommend a journal title/s to a UGC-CARE University through IQAC cell of the nearest college or university only by following prescribed submission process with the recommendation of teaching faculty.
Characteristics of predatory journal
It is important to look for the following signs to identify predatory journals before publishing.
- If the website looks unprofessional with too many errors then it is most likely a predatory journal. The pages usually have unclear or touched-up images. The homepage might directly speak to the authors trying to trick them into the easy publishing route.
- Most predatory journals use Index Copernicus Value as index factor, which has been criticized as unfounded methods of measuring journal impacts.
- Predatory journals do not provide descriptions of the publishing process. Instead it promises a quick turnaround and publication.
- Predatory journals usually do not have any information on how the content will be indexed and preserved.
- According to Beall’s List one of the main methods to identify predatory publishers has been the analysis of unsolicited emails received by academics with invitations to publish their research. Indiscriminate requests for manuscripts using emails with persuasive and misleading messages have increased alarmingly in the recent years.
- These publishers may only have a generic email (e.g., Gmail) and may ask for manuscripts to be submitted by email.
- In order to attract and deceive scholars from developing countries their APC is usually low. Although there is a promise of peer-review, there is absolutely no quality control.
- There is a lack of clarity with copyrights and licences involved.
- A large proportion of these publishers listed staff editors or members of their editorial board, who could not be verified.