Predator and Prey: A Study in the Prevalence of Articles Originally Published by “Predatory Publishers” in an Institutional Repository

Abstract

The problem of academics publishing in journals of dubious quality, published by so-called \u22predatory publishers\u22 is only increasing. A group of IPFW faculty members, concerned about the problem and the affect it could have on their departmental reputations and the futures of graduate students credited as co-authors on such works, approached the IPFW Helmke Library about examining the issue as it manifested itself within Opus, our institutional repository. This led to a year long study which involved sifting through every journal article uploaded to the repository one at a time and comparing their publishers with those listed on Beall\u27s List. The results revealed that, while the problem did indeed exist within our repository, it was limited in scope, and confined to a small numbers of departments and professors. That some of these were repeat offenders made us begin to question the predatory publisher label