Predatory publishing: what it is and how to avoid it
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There are currently approximately 28,000 journals publishing 1.5 million papers annually. Although the majority of new journals are legitimate, the credentials of some are questionable. Such journals and publishers are referred to as 'predatory'. They commonly send spam emails to potential authors, solicit submissions and request payment of article processing charges, but lack academic rigor or credibility. This presentation provides researchers with an insight into predatory behaviors and and how they can avoid them.
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Predatory publishing: what it is and how to avoid it
- 1. Scholarly Publishing Predatory Publishing: what is it and how to avoid it. October 2015 UQ Library Scholarly Communication and Digitisation Services CC Image courtesy of : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AGeorgia_Aquarium_-_Giant_Grouper
- 2. Scholarly Publishing Overview • Context: changes in scholarly communication • Predatory publishing: why, what, and how • Identifying the predators – avoiding the pitfalls • Tools for finding reputable journals
- 3. Scholarly Publishing Game Changer Context: changes in scholarly publishing eJournals Open Access Repositories Hyperlinked references Citation tracking Scholarly Blogs Twitter Social Media Open Access https://101innovations.wordpress.com/about-1/
- 4. Scholarly Publishing Rise of Open Access Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment (SPARC) More access means more potential for impact Not just those with a UQ Login!
- 5. Scholarly Publishing Context: Publish or perish Why publish? • Disseminate new knowledge • Increase the impact and visibility of your research • Establish/build your reputation • Be visible or vanish! 30 – 60% Rejection rate
- 6. Scholarly Publishing What is predatory publishing?
- 7. Scholarly Publishing • Sends spam invitations to students and academics • Editorial Board either non-existent or same person is named as Editor of multiple journals • Name of the journal does not reflect its origin (or does not reveal its location) • Name of journal is VERY broad (to attract more content) • Grammatical errors on website How to spot a predator: Questionable practices of predatory journals
- 8. Scholarly Publishing Questionable practices of predatory journals • Publishes pseudo-science articles • Launches with fleet of empty journals • No value-add services such as reference linking • Not indexed by genuine indexes such as Scopus or Web of Science • Misleading information about having an ‘impact factor’
- 9. Scholarly Publishing Examples of scam emails This is from Frontiers of Engineering Mechanics Research (FEMR). It is a great honor writing to you. We found a paper you published. It’s an excellent paper which is well matched with the Focus & Scope of FEMR. Title: Erratum: Theory of thin-film, narrowband, linear- polarization rejection filters with superlattice structure (Optics Communications (2006) 268:1 (182-188) DOI:10.1016/j.optcom.2006.07.006) To promote the communications in the area of engineering mechanics, we are now sending our earnest invitation for you to submit new paper to FEMR. If you are interested in it, please submit your paper online, Website: http://www.academicpub.org/femr/SubmissionGuidelines.aspx If you are interested in being our reviewer, please send us your CV (including your title, affiliation, department, research interests, qualification, email, etc.). We appreciate the cooperation with you and look forward you hearing from you in the near future. Sorry for any inconvenience caused. Best regards,
- 10. Scholarly Publishing http://weeklyscience.org/default.aspx Examples of journal websites
- 12. Scholarly Publishing Editorial board for each of its 36 journals is : “Chief Editor, Council for Innovative Research http://www.cirworld.com, United States.”
- 13. Scholarly Publishing ‘Sting’ operation exposes fake peer review http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60/suppl/DC1
- 14. Scholarly Publishing Impact upon the Researcher • Longer term reputation sacrificed for immediate gains – no academic gain (no/poor quality peer review or academic rigor) • Permanent ? on your academic reputation • Even if your research is sound, it will likely be disregarded by the academic community if published in a predatory journal • Waste of your research funding – may be held accountable by your funding agency Authors want their work to be read and cited - publish in journals that you know authors in your discipline are reading!
- 15. Scholarly Publishing How to catch a predator and avoid publishing pitfalls Learn to identify and evaluate and select suitable publishing outlets http://guides.library.uq.edu.au/getting-published
- 16. Scholarly Publishing Where to publish: journal evaluation. Identify list of peer-reviewed journal titles Ulrich's Access How will you make your publication available open access? UQ Open Access Policy Impact/prestige • Journal impact factors • Predatory Publishers Aims/scope • Discipline area • Publishes work you cite • Audience Likelihood of acceptance for ECRs. READ journal publishing guidelines
- 17. Scholarly Publishing Useful tools for journal evaluation • Jeffrey Beall’s List and blog • Characteristics of a predatory publisher • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) • Ulrich’s Database of Journals – indicates peer review (Ulrichsweb) • Journal Citation Reports (JCRweb) - impact factors. Search in Database Gateway • UQ Client Services Librarian • UQ Library Scholarly Publishing Service: s.bunce@library.uq.edu.au
- 18. Scholarly Publishing Book publishing - Theses • “ LAP Lambert’s real plan finally became clear: They make money not by selling arcane tomes to readers, but by selling the books back to their authors after they’ve already signed away the rights.” http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/03/lap_lambert_ac ademic_publishing_my_trip_to_a_print_content_farm.html
- 19. Scholarly Publishing Publishing a scholarly monograph • In some disciplines, the scholarly monograph is a common format for publishing research findings • Academics in these disciplines can also fall prey to ‘vanity presses’ masquerading as reputable academic book publishers. • A list of ‘Print-on-demand publishers’, self-publishing ”Vanity presses” and other non-traditional publishers has been compiled. • This guide to Vanity/Subsidy publishers includes a useful list of ‘warning signs’ .
- 20. Scholarly Publishing Before submitting a manuscript Ask yourself • Is this a journal you read? • Is your supervisor familiar with this journal? • Is it indexed by Scopus or Web of Science? • Is the journal or publisher named on the ‘Predatory Publisher List’? http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/
- 21. Scholarly Publishing Supporting OA at UQ – consider ‘green’ UQ eSpace UQ’s official digital space for: • the research outputs • the research data of staff and students of The University of Queensland Post-print
- 22. Scholarly Publishing References: Crawford, W (2011). ALA Editions Special Reports : Open Access: What you need to know now. Chicago, Il. American Library Association Editions.
Editor's Notes
- Good morning, my name is Sharon Bunce and I work in the Scholarly Publishing Unit in the Scholarly Communication and Digitiusation Service in UQ Library.We provide support for UQ researchers and RHD students In open access, data management, research metrics and in publishing. Today we are going to focus upon an issue that whilst it is not new, has certainly gained momentum and become far more prevalant in recent times – the issue of predatory publishing. I will begin by providing some context around the issue ….how the changes in academic publishing have created an environemtn where these types of publishers have been able to dwevelop. We will then look at the why, what and how and concentrate on how you can avoid being the pray – and why you need to avoid it. Finally we will look at the resouces available to assist you with your publishing decisions so that you can make informed choices about where you publish that enhance your research profile, rather than tarnish it.
- Until the mid 1960s, the majority of scholarly communication took place through journals published by Universities, Societies or Associations on behalf of their members, and containing content mostly written by their members. There then came the rapid growth of commercial publishers, who launched their own journals, realising that there was a market for interdisciplinary and inter-country research. In the 1990s journals were one of the early adopters of the Internet and eagerly encouraged digital dissemination, hence the creation of electronic formats (in adition to, or in many cases rather than print formats). The internet has been a game changer. It offers the possibility of creating totally new forms of scholarly communication. Individual articles are discoverable via search engines. Better bibliometric tools reduce reliance on journal impact factors in evaluation. Which, in theory, should give authors more choice in terms of where to publish. Developments since that time, largely the proliferation of the internet have foreshadowed?? the open availablilty of research through repositories, blogs, social media, and the ability to track citations and altmetrics. Along with these developments is the everpresent requirement to publish – to
- Until the mid 1960s, the majority of scholarly communication took place through journals published by Universities, Societies or Associations on behalf of their members, and containing content mostly written by their members. There then came the rapid growth of commercial publishers, who launched their own journals, realising that there was a market for interdisciplinary and inter-country research. In the 1990s journals were one of the early adopters of the Internet and eagerly encouraged digital dissemination, hence the creation of electronic formats (in adition to, or in many cases rather than print formats). The internet has been a game changer. It offers the possibility of creating totally new forms of scholarly communication. Individual articles are discoverable via search engines. Better bibliometric tools reduce reliance on journal impact factors in evaluation. Which, in theory, should give authors more choice in terms of where to publish. Developments since that time, largely the proliferation of the internet have foreshadowed?? the open availablilty of research through repositories, blogs, social media, and the ability to track citations and altmetrics. Along with these developments is the everpresent requirement to publish – to eJournals, Open access repositories, citation tracking, altmetrics, scholarly blogs, twitter. Consequently over 90 research funding bodies now have policies requiring grant recipients to provide an open access copy of any article arising from their grant. SO researchers are regularly faced with meeting these requirements, whilst publishing in a journal that suits their article. This includes the ARC and NHMRC in Australia.
- I want to briefly mention the rise of open access here. When we talk about oa dn scholalry communications, we mean scholarly outputs where the full-text is available free of charge, for anyone with an internet connection. Free to view, free to download and depending on the licence attached to the article, re-use with attribution. Open Access has certainly been another “game changer” in scholarly publishing and greater access to research translates into potential for greater citations and subsequent growth in research your research profile. However, it is relevant in a discussion about predatory publishers as whilst both oa and “traditional” publishers have engaged in questionalble practices, the growth of the oa publishing model where authors pay a fee for oa publication, does provide an opportunity for predatory behaviour.
- Consequently over 90 research funding bodies now have policies requiring grant recipients to provide an open access copy of any article arising from their grant. SO researchers are regularly faced with meeting these requirements, whilst publishing in a journal that suits their article. Towards the end of the presentation, I will touch upon an alternative way to meet funding oa requiremetns, make your publication avaialble openly and publish in a journal of your choice. Consequently, over 90 research funding bodies now have policies requiring grant recipients to provide an open access copy of any article arising from their grant. This includes the ARC and NHMRC in Australia.
- The final piece of the context puzzle around scholarly publishing is the role that publication pays in building your reputation or your research profile. All researchers and ECRs particularly are also Faced with high rates of rejection when submitting articles and are understandably looking for a journal that will take their work.
- Unfortunately, a number of disreputable entrepreneurs see the Gold OA model as an opportunity to enter the extremely lucrative academic journal publishing industry. They are taking advantage of the large numbers of researchers who need publications on their CV to start or advance their career and are having difficulty getting past the robust peer review processes of established journals (OA or subscription-based). These so called predatory publishers have set up new journals which purport to be ‘peer reviewed’ but generally are not. Any article submitted, no matter how flawed, will be published provided the author is willing to pay. In many cases, the authors know that the peer review is not genuine and pay willingly to get their publication numbers up. Generally, these authors are from developing countries where evaluation is still based on number of publications rather than citations. However, these journals have trapped researchers who were NOT aware that they had fallen prey to a publishing scam until it was too late. Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is cleaning house: deleting all entries from its list and “asking all of the journals in its directory to reapply on the basis of stricter criteria.” This development seems clearly to come as the result of growing concern about “predatory” journals—publications that present themselves to potential authors as rigorous and high-quality scholarly open access (OA) journals but actually do little more than collect processing fees up front and then publish whatever is submitted, often without any peer review or even meaningful editorial oversight. Because there is great worldwide demand for the opportunity to place articles in peer-reviewed journals, and because setting up a fake “journal” is both cheap and relatively simple, the appearance and growth of such scams are hardly surprising.
- Sample Beall Engineering Journal (Frontiers of Engineering Mechanics Research) email: You’ll note also that the email uses flowery language and has grammatical mistakes. I hear frequently that researchers are tired of receiving spam from publishers. Spamming researchers by praising their errata is dumb. I think the fact that World Academic Publishing can’t even spam properly is a good indicator of how poor a publisher it is.
- This is the home page for a journal included on Jeffrey Beall’s list of stand-alone ‘predatory’ journals. Notice the poor grammar The Science ‘update’ infer these are articles are published in this journal (they are not). In fact no references are given for the updates – which is a big red flag. Also the science update listed here was still being used as a ‘new science update’ 9 months later!!!!!!!!!!!!! Notice that the indexing is by unknown tools. The link to ‘publish video article’ is broken
- This one has the same ‘editorial board’ for each of its 36 journals. No named individuals. They have include ‘United States’ to make it sound authoritative (and attract naïve researchers in developing countries).
- Last year, an article by staff journalist, John Bohannon, from the journal Science described a sting operation in which variants of a fake scholarly paper were submitted to 304 ‘suspect’ open access journals to test the rigour of their reviewing processes. Bohannon wrote the paper under the fake name of 'Ocorrafoo Cobange' supposedly a biologist at the Wassess Institute of Medicine in Asmara, which does not exist. The papers were carefully crafted to be superficially credible but contained major flaws which competent reviewers should have been able to spot. 157 of the journals (52 per cent) accepted the paper for publication; in many cases without any evidence that the paper had actually been read by anyone.
- Longer term reputation and career prospects sacrificed for immediate gains – no academic gain (no peer review or academic rigor) Permanent stain (/) on your academic reputation Even if your research is sound, it will likely be disregarded by the academic community if published in a predatory journal Waste of your research funding – may be held accountable by your funding agency
- Learn to identify/evaluate and select suitable publishing outlets – include a link to choosing a journal on SP libguide
- DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to quality open access, peer-reviewed journals.
- Excerpt: “The contract told me—as I’d already learned from the blog posts—that I’d transfer the exclusive right to print my thesis to AV Akademikerverlag GmbH & Co. KG, the German company that owned LAP Lambert. (I could still let people download the thesis digitally, if I wasn’t making a profit.) They’d pay for all publishing costs, and I’d get 12 percent of the book’s royalties, but only if they cleared 50 euros per month for a calendar year—otherwise, I’d just get credit to use in buying other LAP Lambert books. Over the next two weeks, I got three more emails from Holmes pressuring me to buy, each more aggressive than the last. She used several strategies: guilt (“We agreed to provide you free ISBN, free cataloguing of your book in thousands of bookstores, free book cover, market coverage, support and assistance. We are now offering you the opportunity to support your project.”); optimism (“You can also purchase some copies and market them in your locality or maybe even sell them at your own price, thus not only generating profit, but also getting to know your target audience and perhaps establishing valuable contacts.”); and finally, hostility (“We would have thought that you would have at least liked to have some copies of your new published book and that is why proposed this offer to you in the first place. For kicks, I’d buried an errant phrase deep in the middle, partly to see if LAP Lambert’s editors ever actually read the thing. When I got to Page 86, I was gratified to find that they hadn’t noticed it. Right there on the middle of the page, amid talk of Oglala Lakota politics and tribal sovereignty was my insertion. “Is any proofreader actually reading this book before it gets printed?” I’d asked. “Didn’t think so.” Note: ‘books’ published by VDM or Lap Lambert are not accepted as publications for HERDC or ERA.