Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Predatory Publishing but Were Afraid to Ask

Librarians have a key role to play in educating users about predatory publishing. Predatory publishing can be described as low quality, amateurish, and often unethical academic publishing that is usually Open Access (OA). Understanding predatory publishing helps authors to make more informed decisions about where to publish. In the process of educating our users, librarians can set the ground for important conversations that encourage critical thinking about the scholarly communications process. Predatory publishing stems from broader problems including overemphasis on publication quantity, an OA models based on traditional, for-profit publishing, and resource disparities in the Global South. When users take fuller responsibility and ownership of scholarly communications, knowledge can be a public good and not a commodity. A more sustainable and just scholarly communications ecosystem can be a reality. As effective advocates for OA, librarians need to be ready to respond to those who conflate OA and predatory publishing. It is helpful to contextualize predatory publishing as an aspect of evaluating publishers and the quality of scholarship. This helps promote the idea that due diligence is the responsibility of all scholars, whether as authors, peers, or administrators. Additionally, positioning (deliberate) predatory publishing in the broader arena of unethical and fraudulent scholarly practices helps to decouple predatory publishing from OA and boosts our ability to communicate effectively with non-librarians

Without stronger ethical standards, predatory publishing will continue to be a permanent feature of scholarly communication

Predatory publishing has been the subject of much heated debate and conjecture. Panagiotis Tsigaris and Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva, argue that predatory publishing still remains under-scrutinized, enigmatic and in need of effective collective solutions. Without clearer and stronger ethical standards in scholarly publishing, they argue that responses to predatory publishing will continue to be uncoordinated and ultimately unsuccessful

What I learned from predatory publishers

This article is a first-hand account of the author’s work identifying and listing predatory publishers from 2012 to 2017. Predatory publishers use the gold (author pays) open access model and aim to generate as much revenue as possible, often foregoing a proper peer review. The paper details how predatory publishers came to exist and shows how they were largely enabled and condoned by the open-access social movement, the scholarly publishing industry, and academic librarians. The author describes tactics predatory publishers used to attempt to be removed from his lists, details the damage predatory journals cause to science, and comments on the future of scholarly publishing

There is no black and white definition of predatory publishing

The nature and extent of predatory publishing is highly contested. Whilst debates have often focused defining journals and publishers as either predatory or not predatory. Kyle Siler argues that predatory publishing encompasses a spectrum of activities and that by understanding this ambiguity, we can better understand and make value judgements over where legitimacy lies in scholarly communication

Cabells Scholarly Analytics: A Go-To Source on Journal Quality (Review)

Cabells Scholarly Analytics (https://www2.cabells.com/journals ) is reviewed. Cabells is a publisher of the white list of publishing opportunities, and the black list of predatory journals and publishers, following the ceasing of Beall\u27s List of Predatory Publishing

Parallels of Unintentional Plagiarism and Predatory Publishing: Understanding Root Causes and Solutions

Plagiarism and predatory publishing share common attributes. Although students do not publish in predatory journals, both plagiarism and predatory publishing fall under the umbrella of academic integrity and scholarly ethics. Academic misconduct has many faces, ranging from student cheating on exams to purchasing a doctoral thesis and claiming it as one’s own work. Some forms of academic misconduct, such as the examples above are always intentional. However, many manifestations of academic misconduct are less clearly intentional. Students often plagiarize unintentionally because they lack writing skills including paraphrasing and citing. Faculty sometimes publish with predatory journals when they lack scholarly publishing knowledge. Weak information literacy underpins both behaviors. However, other factors drive both plagiarism and predatory publishing. Three broad areas are cultural considerations, generational differences, and local academic values. The discourse related to cultural considerations is especially fruitful to unpack. Unintentional and intentional violations of academic integrity are the outgrowth of a scholarly ecosystem that is post-colonial and neoliberal. Students and faculty are under-supported, expected to produce too much with too little time. Pedagogical solutions to academic integrity problems are helpful in the short term but limited when the underlying system doesn’t support positive change

Global Awareness and Pandemic in Predatory Journals and Publishing: A Bibliometric Analysis

Open access publishing not only increases accessibility to library materials and publications but also provokes the growth of predatory journals. The objectives of this study were to 1) corroborate the increasing concern of predatory journals, 2) identify journals publishing articles that commented on this issue, and 3) pinpoint occupations, academic disciplines, and geographic locations of these authors. This bibliometric study covered 2010-2020 tracking the library and information science literatures on the subject of predatory journals and outlined the trends. Analytical results of this study showed that there was an increasing global awareness of predatory journals among academic librarians and the scholarly community. The findings suggest a critical need for establishing information literacy in academia in the context of predatory journals, prompting academic librarians and scholarly authors to collaboratively deal with the pandemic of predatory publications

Tricked Into Submission: Health Science Librarian\u27s Role in Fighting Predatory Publishing and Spamferences

Objectives This paper explores the phenomena of predatory publishing, pseudo-scientific conferences, and vanity press publishers. Should these publications and conference presentations count towards tenure decisions? Are faculty tenure and promotion committees also being fooled? This paper explores the librarian role as gatekeeper, curator, and broker of knowledge. What are the characteristics and danger signs of low quality and predatory publishers? How can librarians promote and support publishing with reputable publishers and help improve manuscript quality? Methods The Author recently served as the chair of the University Personnel Committee, the tenure and promotion committee at Governors State University, a public university in Illinois, and also has served as chair of the Library Faculty Personnel Committee. Faculty tenure and promotion committees are unprepared for discerning reputable publishers and conferences from predatory, or identifying vanity publications. Examples from predatory and vanity publishing and predatory scholarly conferences will be reviewed and analyzed. The core skill sets needed by librarians who support scholarly and professional publishing, and roles for librarians will be proposed. Results The extent of the problem is unknown, and impact unclear, but librarians have the resources and skills to ensure access to high quality information. Communities of concern and research are forming around these issues, such as Professor Jeffrey Beall\u27s Scholarly Open Access blog. Health Science Librarians are joining other librarins in raising awareness in their communities, and fighting back against predatory publishing practices. Conclusions More research is needed. Buyer Beware must be our motto, both for librarians making purchasing decisions, authors seeking to publish their work, and credentialing and tenure committees

Predatory Journals: A Threat to Scholarly Publishing

Nowadays the world of scholarly publishing is in serious trouble because of the increasing number of predatory publishing. Besides, citation of articles from predatory journals is also unethical that undermines the quality of research papers. Because of ignorance of predatory publishing and/or compulsion of getting published in a limited time, scholars from Universities and young researchers become victim to predatory or hijacked journals. The purpose of this paper is to create awareness among authors, especially novice ones, about predatory publication. Research institutions should encourage their researchers to publish their articles in valuable journals indexed in Web of Science's Journal Citation Reports (JCR), Clarivate Analytics, formerly part of Thomson-Reuters) or other famous scientific databases such as Scopus, PubMed and MEDLINE. In this way, attention to the Thomson Reuters’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and Journal Ranking (JRK) and Scopus grade (Q1, Q2 and Q3) may be useful and necessary