When Dr. Anna O. Szust emailed all of these academic journals to join their editorial boards, she did not anticipate that so many of them would approve her application within hours. In fact, she did not think anything at all, as she did not exist.
“Szust” is the Polish word for “fraud,” and Dr. Szust was a fabrication concocted for the purpose of a sting operation in 2015. Her scientific degrees were fake and her profile fell far short of what she needed to be an editor for an academic journal, tasked with judging the merits of a manuscript and overseeing its peer review. Nonetheless, many journals welcomed her into their editorial family, with four of them stunningly appointing her editor-in-chief!
What went wrong?
You may have heard the name “predatory journal” before. Academic journals publish the findings and opinions of academics. Scientific journals, in particular, release the results of scientific studies in the form of papers which, we are told, are reviewed prior to publication by peers—fellow scientists in the field who are supposed to scrutinize the manuscript and ensure that bad science doesn’t get a pass. A predatory journal only pretends to do so. It exists solely to make money. It’s like a parasite on the back of the scientific endeavour. What it publishes, then, is of questionable quality.
The public discourse on predatory journals often errs on the side of simplicity. There are good journals, like Nature and Science, and there are predatory journals, I hear. The bad journals often come from developing nations. And the way to avoid sending a manuscript to a predatory journal, or to believe the findings of a paper that has been published in a predatory publication, is to check Beall’s list.
The truth of the matter is that disentangling good journals from bad ones is a lot more complicated. As with the distinction between science and pseudoscience, there is no clear line. There is a grey zone and red flags to look out for.
The problems with Beall’s list
We often don’t think of academic publishing as an industry, but it is. I have seen it described in the literature as a “highly profitable oligopoly,” with a few major publishers, like Elsevier and Thomson Reuters, owning a large number of journals. Traditionally, academic journals would sustain themselves financially mainly by running ads and charging libraries subscription fees. If you wanted to read a paper they had published, you would either have to go through a library that subscribed to the journal or you would pay the publisher a fee (generally 30-60$) to access this one paper. Knowledge was stuck behind a paywall. Understandably, many were not happy about that, especially since so much of knowledge production is paid for with public money.
Over the past few decades, a new movement gained devotees: open access. The idea was that open access publications should be free to be read by anyone, and these journals should make money in some other way, often by charging the scientists themselves a fee for publishing, not for reading.
Predatory journals predate the rise of open access, but they benefitted from the acceptability of charging authors money for publication. Predation was also facilitated by the Internet. To set up a predatory journal, you no longer had to print a magazine and ship it; you could simply set up a website. And given the recent surge in academics from countries in the Global South, more and more scientists need to publish than ever before. The demand is massive. Predatory journals are happy to lend a hand.
An important step in solving a problem is to properly define it, and there is unfortunately no agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a predatory journal. It has often borrowed from Justice Potter Stewart’s take on hardcore pornography: “I know it when I see it.” It hinges on motives, which are hard to prove. The people behind these predatory publications don’t want to publish good science; they just want to make money. They are thus exploiting the system by charging fees to scientists without providing them with the kinds of services these scientists expect: diligent peer review and the promise that their paper, once accepted, will be searchable and accessible online for a long time. It’s the equivalent of choosing a construction crew that ignores building codes. The codes themselves may not be perfect, and you may get lucky, but it invites sloppiness and electrical hazards.
It's a common misconception that having to pay to get published is a sign that the journal is predatory. It’s not. Open access journals commonly charge publication fees and many of them are legitimate publications. Moreover, traditional journals can charge fees to their authors—for the number of pages the paper has, for the printing of colour figures, and for printed copies of the paper to be shared around—though these fees are much less common than they used to be. Some traditional journals have also become hybrid publications, where their papers sit behind a paywall unless their authors choose to pay a fee to make them open access. A payment for publication is thus not the smoking gun for catching a predator.
So, what is? People habitually point to Beall’s list. This online list of potential predatory journals and publishers was curated by Jeffrey Beall, a now-retired librarian and associate professor who used to work at the University of Colorado Denver. Beall himself is credited with coining the term “predatory journal,” and his criteria for deciding if a publication fit the profile changed over time. In January 2017, the list disappeared, the reason being, he said, intense pressure from his employer (a story disputed by the university and his supervisor). An archived version of it, maintained by an anonymous post-doctoral fellow, can be accessed here for now.
There were problems with Beall and his list, however. No publication deserves to be blacklisted by a single individual, who acts as judge, jury, and executioner. When science journalist John Bohannon famously submitted 304 versions of a terrible fake paper to open access journals to see who would publish it, 18% of the ones Bohannon had selected and that happened to be featured on Beall’s list actually rejected it. A truly predatory journal would publish anything for money. As was pointed out at the time, Beall had falsely accused many journals of being potentially predatory on appearances alone.
We all have biases, and Beall’s own biases were documented by other librarians. He was quick to condemn journals emerging from developing countries and made comments that were construed by some as bigoted. His vilification of predatory journals often bled into a criticism of the open access principle as a whole, with his supervisor accusing him of “dangerous nostalgia” for the days when traditional publications reigned supreme. Beall in fact accused the open access movement of being “anti-corporatist” and called the authors of open access declarations “hero-wannabes” and “zealots.”
The days of relying on a single person to bless or condemn an entire journal are hopefully over. A better solution has emerged from the limited literature on the problem: we need to point out the red flags of predatory publishers so that authors and readers alike can judge for themselves.
Catering to authors, not readers
None of the following red flags on its own is sufficient to castigate a journal, but if you end up with a whole collection of them, you’re probably looking at a predatory outlet.
One of the key peculiarities of a predatory journal is that it caters to authors much more than readers. The website itself is made to court potential authors and to highlight how easy the manuscript submission process is. It promises rapid review and publication. Instead of using a dedicated online submission portal for papers, it will often ask for authors to simply attach their paper to an email. And since potential authors are unlikely to visit their website, they will send out many email invitations to publish or even to serve on their editorial board. These invitations are often full of compliments, such as in this email received by an orthodontist: “Based on your eminent expertise and immense contributions in the field, we warmly solicit your participation in the upcoming issue.”
A predatory journal tends to have too large of a scope, accepting papers on topics as diverse as nuclear physics, geography, and nursing. Its name may include the name of a country, but its street address shows it is located elsewhere, if a street address and comprehensive contact information are even provided. It may use logos associated with prestige but use low-resolution versions with fuzzy borders or come up with a knock-off version, like it wants you to think you really are buying a Louis Vuitton bag. Its contact email is commonly not an institutional address, but a Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo email, and many of its listed editors, when they are real, may not even realize their names are being used in this way.
Counterintuitively, the fees it charges to get published are often at least 18-fold lower than non-predatory journals. In a study reporting on the red flags of predatory journals, the non-predatory open access journals charged between 800 and 2,205$ to publish a paper, while the predatory publications were asking for 63 to 150$. A predatory publisher could thus make 10,000$ a year publishing 100 papers in a single journal. If it controls, let’s say, a total of 50 predatory journals, that’s half a million dollars in its pockets annually.
As for the link between predatory journals and countries in the Global South, the situation is complex. In the above study of predatory journals and how they compare to their legitimate open access counterparts, 75% of the former were based in low- to middle-income countries, compared to 20% of the latter, which can explain the grammatical mistakes often made in emails sent by predatory journals. One of the countries often flagged as producing many predatory publications is India. In 2013, its university grants commission mandated that graduate students had to publish two research papers to get their Ph.D. With over 1,100 universities on Indian soil, this edict created a massive demand that predatory publishers were all too happy to answer. And before we are quick to condemn people from the Global South for publishing in these fake journals, a survey of people who published in them revealed that 40% of them came from high-income countries. Some didn’t know the journal was fake. Others saw a shortcut to publication glory.
The bottom line is that predatory publishing is not a black-and-white problem. If we care about the quality of the science being published, traditional journals publish poor research all the time, and peer review is not sufficient to prevent sloppiness and outright fraud from getting out there. Predatory journals can also publish good science. If we care about profits, the money predatory journals make is overshadowed by the income of the traditional academic publishing industry. If we care about the poisoning of the scientific well, it is unclear at this point just how much impact predatory journals have. A small study looked at 250 papers they published and noted that nearly two-thirds of them had never been cited anywhere, a far cry from Jeffrey Beall’s estimation that the threat they pose hasn’t been seen “since the Inquisition.” More robust evaluations are needed, clearly, but we would be wrong to simply equate bad science with predatory journals.
In fact, predatory publishers are a symptom of a systemic problem: the publish-or-perish mentality in academia. Papers are a currency in universities. They are seen as gauges of productivity, fame, and success. With more countries training scientists and adopting this publish-or-perish mentality, predatory publishers are bound to make a killing.
Note: Academics looking for help on the topic of predatory journals can visit the following websites: the DOAJ’s whitelist, the COPE’s whitelist, the OASPA’s whitelist, and the Think.Check.Submit checklist. They should keep in mind that no one list can ever be comprehensive or completely accurate.
Take-home message:
- A predatory journal looks like a genuine academic journal, but it will publish any paper with little to no peer review in exchange for the paper’s authors paying a fee
- Paying to get a paper published is not, however, a sign that a journal is predatory, as this is common practice among legitimate open access journals, whose content is free to be read by anyone
- Some of the signs that a journal is predatory is that its website caters more to authors than to readers, it often sends out invitation emails with flowery language, and its scope is much broader than would be expected, publishing papers on nuclear physics, geography and nursing, for example
