Predatory Publishers

Uh so i’m maureen babb. I’m a science librarian at the university of manitoba here and i’m going to be presenting today in the open science series on predatory publishers. Uh so what we’re hoping to cover or what i’m i guess if no royal we it’s just me um what. I’m hoping to cover in this presentation. Today is that you’ll learn about the history of predatory publishing that you’ll identify the problems that predatory publishing can cause within the academic literature and you’ll learn techniques to identify and avoid predatory journals both in terms of not using content from them and in terms of not publishing in them. So hopefully. That’s what you’re here here for so i’m going to start off with a quick poll. Uh if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers could take the time to answer have you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers heard of predatory journals or predatory publishers before and so. I’ll just wait until i’ve got some responses there. Okay so i’m seeing some yeses and some i’ve heard of them but i don’t know uh what they what the details are about them so uh so it looks like there’s some background information already so that’s good um i’m going to close the poll now and we will continue on. So that’s good to know so. In terms of what are predatory publishers. Now over the years there have been different definitions given out but in 2019. The journal nature published an article that was a consensus definition that was created based on a large group of people who had expertise in the area of predatory publishers and they sat down and hammered out. Something that fit the it was a definition that fit predatory journals that they were all comfortable with and so that definition is listed here predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information deviation from best editorial and publication practices a lack of transparency and or use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices. And if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers read that article which i’ve i’ve put the citation for it there just underneath.

Um you’ll see that. There are certain things that people going into it had expected would be in the definition stuff about peer review. That’s still relevant when talking about predatory journals but wasn’t something that was easy to identify from the outside. Peer review is generally sort of secret. You publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers don’t get to know who’s doing the peer reviewing in most cases unless you’re doing open peer review um and so it’s difficult to look at a journal and discern for sure if they’re actually doing peer review particularly if it you’re just thinking of submitting somewhere and haven’t actually submitted so it’s not something that outsiders can assess very easily so this is the definition of pure of um predatory journals but it doesn’t necessarily cover everything that should be considered when thinking about predatory journals so in terms of the history of predatory publishing. I’ll start with sort of a basic background on the history of traditional publishing. In which you’d have you’d submit to a journal the journal would publish for free. Um and then they would. The journals would sell the output the actual finished journal to libraries to readers for a certain fee. And so that’s where the money comes from. And of course there’s been a move towards open access this idea that everybody should have access to the information particularly if it’s publicly funded access to research and that sort of thing so then open access comes about and open access is a very good thing and and i firmly agree with the idea. That research should be accessible to people but this sort of made an issue for uh the the traditional publishers. Because all of a sudden if you’re releasing the information for free you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers can’t charge a subscription fee for access to it that defeats the purpose of open so this changed the model around so it becomes an author pays fee and so the author pays upfront to publish in the journal. Um and so this model i think you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers can gather is it’s right for exploitation right um there’s you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know if you’re buying something at the end you’re not going to pay for garbage but if you’re uh if you’re paying up front well there’s there’s more opportunity that you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers can be deceived that you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers can be led astray.

And so jeffrey beale in 2010 he’s an american librarian coined. The term predatory publishing and the term predatory publishing itself has had there have been debates over the validity of the term predatory publishing. If it’s too divisive but it’s the one that everybody knows and it’s the one that we’ve sort of stuck with at this point so in terms of now peer review wasn’t mentioned as i said in that definition but it’s something that people think about a lot when we think about predatory journals and it probably does play a major role so peer review of course is the process during which a manuscript is sent to experts in the field of whatever that manuscript is in to solicit feedback and then they give that feedback to the journal the journal gives it back to the author the author revises their work and so on and so forth many predatory journals claim to undertake peer review. But often they’ll they’ll say you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know rapid peer review very fast in a in a day in a week. Um which is i used to say when i was doing this presentation that that’s not enough time to do a peer review a proper peer review. But as we’ve been going through this covid situation we’ve seen that. In certain extraordinary circumstances that can be enough time uh to do a proper peer review but in general it’s not um and in general people don’t really have that incentive of you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know a global pandemic to try and get through the peer review as quickly and as carefully as possible and so many predatory journals claim to undertake peer review in some cases it’s obvious that they don’t undertake peer review at all in some cases what they claim is peer review is just sort of a copy editing review. They’ll change some of your words and many of them will offer rapid peer reviews often at higher prices.

Um and so acceptance can be within a week or i’ve even read papers where acceptance can be within an hour and i mean even in the the special situation of the covid pandemic peer review within an hour is completely unreasonable so so in terms of uh predatory journals then you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers think about the quality of articles and one of the questions that comes up is well. What’s in predatory journals. Um and so in 2013 this guy john bohannon did a sting operation basically and he said he wrote up a a poor quality article um and he submitted it to 304 open access journals and over half of them were accepted and his take on. This was that any genuine peer review would have caught absolutely glaring errors so it looked like a legitimate paper but it it wasn’t it wasn’t real science in any way so this sting operation led to meaningful change in the directory of open access journals. Which is one of the the biggest uh collections of open access resources so open access the directory of open access journals is now much more. Um careful about which journals it accepts um but there’s been a lot of criticism of the bohan and sting like the bohannon in his paper says you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know this demonstrates that these journals aren’t serious that they’re not for real that they don’t take their their scholarly duty. Seriously um and other people have said well but you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers submitting this was functionally academic dishonesty in like a normal person isn’t submitting a deliberately bad paper um and so they say well whether or not you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know. There’s there’s debate about whether or not this is a valid way to assess journals also. There was no comparison. He didn’t submit it to to non-open access journals to see how many of them accepted it. Um and so since then other studies have been done on the content in predatory journals usually within a specific field and so what does equality look like when you’re not submitting a deliberately bad article and saying like yeah.

They accepted this bad news so one of them that looked at nursing journals by our men and are all in 2017. They found that the articles look genuine at a glance but when they took closer look they found that flawed research design was common on 32.4 percent of journals and the articles themselves were of poor or average quality and that plagiarized content was common in almost half of the the articles that they sampled. But again they didn’t compare to non-predatory non-open access journals so there’s still some criticism but it does look like the quality is not great another study the mower and all 2017 that i’ve cited there suggests that the articles in them typically display bad reporting bad methods or both but i do think that it’s important to note here that there can be quality content in these journals as well um just because somebody submitted a paper to a bad journal doesn’t mean that the paper itself is bad. Now this is important to consider as we look sort of at the the murkiness of the predatory journal situation. And i’ll get into it a little bit more um but it probably means that they haven’t had the same the study even if it’s good probably hasn’t gone through the same rigorous process that uh that articles in more legitimate journals have and this is something to bear in mind. Um there’s also i’m going to talk briefly about a subspecies of predatory journals. Now these are called hijacked journals and they’re almost they’re probably more deliberately predatory than your average predatory journals because they’re ones that take the name of a well-known journal. Um and then you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know they’ll change the word order of the title or maybe they’ll add like an international journal of such and such so if you’ve got the american journal of archaeology maybe they’ll change it around to the american archaeological journal which here may not be a real journal. I don’t know off the top of my head so don’t assume that this i’m just using it as an example.

Um so yeah but but it creates this idea that you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know. They’ll maybe fool people into submitting to them some of them even take the actual name the american journal of archaeology and just set up a dummy page have authored submit pay money and then obviously your article is not published in the american journal of archaeology. And you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers don’t get the benefit of that and your work doesn’t get out there. Um so yeah. Subspecies of predatory journals hijack journals somebody pretending to be what they’re not a dog wearing groucho marx glasses. You publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know um so in terms of another thing to consider that’s become more and more of an issue and i’m not going to spend too long on this but there are predatory conferences as well. Um these conferences. They’ll often send out you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know invitations. Just like you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers get with predatory journals sending out invitations. They’re becoming increasingly a problem. It’ll be interesting to see if that remains true after sort of the break of the pandemic but oftentimes these will claim keynote speakers and other presenters that may or may not actually attend. Um that usually don’t attend they charge exorbitant fees. They’re often in sort of you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know vacation destinations. So hawaii and places like that um places where people will want to go to to pay those exorbitant fees and and oftentimes um there was one person who attended one and reported on it and said you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know they. They promoted this as a conference in my area but it turned out that there were about 10 different conferences. They were running at the same time out of the same hotel and each one had about one speaker most of which were completely irrelevant to anything that i cared about. And most of which were not of any sort of scholarly quality and i was just sitting there feeling like i wasted my money. That’s this author says right and i’ve noticed even in my own email that even though you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers can’t go to holiday destinations right now and that sort of thing that there have still been advertisements for predatory virtual conferences during uh the covid situation.

So i’d be interested to see what those are like but not interested enough to pay the money to do so so um as we carry on uh so i mentioned this briefly i would say that this is probably when people have sort of passing familiarity with predatory journals probably the one thing they know about them is that they send spam they will send emails to you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers over and over again. They’ll be very flattering emails. They’ll say you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know you’ve seen your publication on this thing. We hope that you’ll come and submit a journal to ours and they all kind of look you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know like this um a lot of times they have weird greetings. Dear m maureen. Uh warm greetings honorable dr maureen babb dear dr maureen babb greetings of the day. Dear dr m maureen dear dr maureen babb you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know and these are all they’re they’re talking about all my my wonderful contributions to a field that i have nothing to do with um i i have published in you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know nursing journals and things like that but i’m certainly not an expert and anybody who was legitimately inviting experts to conferences would know that um and you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers just keep getting more of them this last one here. It’s interesting because it’s got all these he’s like. Oh this is an approved journal. It’s it’s part of this. Index copernicus value of 5.72 it’s got a scientific journal impact factor 2016 of 6.86. And all this sort of stuff. Those are all made up metrics um there is a journal impact factor and it’s the only thing that is called impact factor. It’s this journal impact factor. Um all these other ones index copernicus value uh journal or scientific journal impact factor. These are all made up. And actually there’s like a weird little cottage industry of 10 impact factors where journals can pay money to get on to these fake indexes at higher ranks right so when they send out these emails. Well i’ve got an index copernicus value of 5.

72 well maybe you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers paid for that ranking or maybe you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers just say you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers haven’t assumed that nobody will check but either way the index kapernicus value isn’t real and one of the other things of course nobody. They’re just the journals are just scanning and pulling names and email addresses from wherever they can find them that have published in other journal articles or in other journals and this is most obvious to me because i’ve published on the topic of predatory journals and i periodically get emails from predatory journals saying like. Oh man we loved your your paper on predatory journals. We’d love you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers to submit to our own predatory journal because you’re such an expert in the field usually the field they’re talking about. Is you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know business administration or something that i have zero to do with so so yes if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers get one of these emails just delete them or or save them to use in a presentation like i did but don’t respond to them. Don’t submit to these journals. Um it’s not that legitimate journals never send out calls over email lists or anything like that or even will occasionally approach people individually but things like this no no. These aren’t and the first time you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers get one you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers might be flattered you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers might think wow somebody’s been reading my work. Wow somebody thinks it’s good quality. Wow somebody wants me me to submit based on the work i’ve already done and that can be really nice to hear and particularly for for newer researchers. It’s a way that they can trap you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers and have you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers pay all this money to them and submit your work to their journal instead of to a legitimate one which can cause real problems for you. Your work may not be able to be published elsewhere. It may not be able to be shared it may be deleted and of course it won’t be in a legitimate journal um so yes be wary of these emails just delete them honestly report them in spam. Maybe yeah um so. Then the question becomes well who has published in predatory journals and i would say that the vast majority of people who publish in predatory journals seem to have been people who have been feel fooled who saw those emails and who thought wow this seems like a good idea and they submit.

And they don’t realize that it’s a predatory journal there are however people who publish in predatory journals knowing exactly what they are now i would say i suspect and based on a couple of studies that have looked at motives. I would say that this is not the majority of people who submit to these journals but they might do it for speed. Maybe they’ve got a a 10-year or 10-year deadline or a job application deadline or a promotion deadline coming up and they just need that one more presentation on their cv or one more publication on their cv. But they know that they won’t have the time to get it in to a real journal before the deadline. So they submit to a predatory journal and hope nobody notices um. This is sort of a way of gaming the system. Maybe you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers look like you’re really prolific because you’ve published in all these journals but the stuff you’re submitting. Isn’t that good you’ve submitted it to a journal that doesn’t bother to vet anything. Um you’ve submitted plagiarized content. Who knows right. But there’s been evidence of that too um there’s people who submit because they’ve tried and submitted to other journals and they just got sick of it not being accepted so they decided that it’s better to go to a predatory journal than nowhere at all or even if because they know right from the outset that their work isn’t strong enough to be published in a legitimate journal and decide they don’t care and are going to publish anyways. There are also those with political or financial motivations. There’s some evidence that certain pharmaceutical companies have published their work in predatory journals. Because they get out they get the results out faster and because they get them out faster then they’re able to start making money off of their product earlier now in that particular instance when they they looked at pharmaceutical companies.

Had that had done this when they examined the studies. The study seemed fine right. But they’d gone with this predatory journal so um and then there are a number of people who just don’t see the problem with predatory journals at all who think that a journal is a journal and it doesn’t matter whether or not they’re working primarily for money or working for scientific effort and many people will argue very legitimately that more legitimate publishers charge huge amounts of money for author processing fees or or that are making huge amounts of money off of scholars. And this is true but there’s a difference in my mind between journals that want a lot of money but still value the quality of scholarship in journals that value money over the quality of scholarship. Um so anyways this is who publishes in predatory journals again the vast majority of them are just people who are victims and that’s why predatory journals have the name predatory journals. They are preying upon academics who are hoping to publish their work in a legitimate journal so what is the problem with predatory journals anyways and there are a number of them um one of the big ones is that it pollutes the the scholarly literature with work that isn’t held to a proper scholarly standard. Um there’s also the potential if you’re looking at those rare individuals who are using predatory journals to gain the system um then you’ve basically got scholars that have dubious credentials that have gotten where they are with dubious work and that’s that’s not great. Um one of the other things uh particularly for people who have been caught up and and tricked by predatory journals is that this can really damage their reputation. Um depending on how much an institution or hiring committee or something cares about uh predatory journals and catches them right like you. You publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers look like you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers haven’t done your due diligence as a scholar if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers publish in one of these journals and and also you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers can be caught paying exorbitant fees that you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers didn’t realize or you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers can realize later that.

Hey this was a predatory journal and actually i want to publish it in a legitimate journal but because you’ve published it somewhere else you’re no longer able to publish it in a more legitimate journal and of course. These damage to reputation considerations can apply to people that cite predatory articles as well um if they’re basing conclusions off of them and and this can of course affect the quality of the work that has built on top of studies that are in predatory journals. Um there’s also a lack of permanence. Uh academic problem properly managed academic journals have a policy and procedures for making sure that the content remains available um for years and decades and centuries to come this is not true of predatory journals and sometimes a predatory journal that existed last week will no longer exist and all the work that was put into it will no longer be there will no longer be accessible for anybody to read and one of the other things is that because anybody can access the findings in this in these uh predatory journals as long as they’re still up and haven’t been removed and they look like scholarly journal or scholarly articles especially to people who don’t have a background in the area. This undermines the validity of research and scholarship in the public view because it it allows people to find you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know studies that maybe support whatever they believe but aren’t backed by anything and it. If people are aware that there’s a whole sort of industry of scholarship that’s just completely bogus and they don’t understand the nuance of the situation. And that this is something that that scholarly organizations fight against. Uh then they’ll say well you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know why should i trust this source but not this source sort of thing so it they. The big ones are really that they pollute literature and they undermine the validity of scholarship and also that they have a chance to cause real damage to the people who end up submitting to them so then another question is where is the problem of predatory journals and in the past there have been there’s been sort of a perception that this is a problem that is limited to developing nations that it doesn’t really matter in places like canada and the united states and britain and wherever and this has this was never really based on anything there have been studies that indicate that many of the predatory journals themselves are based out of um well particularly india but but developing nations in general and but in terms of who publishes in them this perception that it’s that it’s only localized to the developing world.

Or that it’s only localized to brand new scholars. Upon exploration upon study. This is proven to not be true. It’s a global problem. People all over the world submit to predatory journals people at all sorts of institutions submit to predatory journals people at all stages of their career submit to predatory journals so it is truly a global problem and it is something that we need to think about um so i talked about the idea of polluting the literature so there are a couple of examples. One that i’ll talk about. Is this freshwater ichthyology in india so apparently in ichthyology it’s very important to have accurate names of fish in your in as you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers go through into your taxonomy and that sort of thing but i guess that some universities in india will give you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers a bonus if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers publish an article naming a new fish or identifying a new fish or something like that and so people submit to predatory journals and they say like hey i found this new fish um but in fact they’ve just renamed some fish that everybody already knew about um and then this causes a problem not only because these scholars are being dishonest but because when people are going back to do an analysis of all these different fish in the area they end up coming across different names names.

They haven’t recognized and they’re like oh i better add that into my my analysis. Even though it’s actually describing you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know it’s fish b here but it’s actually describing fish a uh that you’ve already got in your analysis so apparently this has been a real issue in this particular field um and you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers can check that out. In that 2014 article predatory journals and indian ideology and so then there are other questions okay so if if this stuff is polluting the literature well is this stuff actually being cited or is it just being ignored and so one study of biomedical journals in nigeria found that most of the art like that on average articles were being that were published in predatory journals were being cited 2.25 times each right so that is polluting the literature um and then some other studies have suggested that in certain fields the number of predatory journals is almost equivalent to the number of legitimate journals now this is not common. I want to emphasize that most fields are not like that. But there are a few um and and all these are cited below the studies that these are from um and so this this is a concern it is polluting the literature in some areas more than others. It’s causing a bigger problem in some areas than others. Um but predatory journals are continuing to expand they’re continuing to grow and so this is something that we need to be aware of. So you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers take a look at this um could you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers tell the difference. Could you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers just from glancing at a a a reference list. Could you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers look at something and say okay. Well which one’s which one was published in a predatory journal or a probably predatory journal right. I mean i know i couldn’t um this one oops sorry i’ve got it. This one is supposedly public in a published in a journal. That has been alleged to be uh predatory right and so like you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers wouldn’t you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers wouldn’t know the difference if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers saw this on somebody’s cv or if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers saw it in a google scholar.

Search right it looks just like anything else. Um and you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know i’m not saying like oh yeah we should. We should know just from a glance that this is predatory journal. That’s obviously unrealistic. Right so the the problem has to be dealt with at a larger scale. Um so then the question of damage and i’ve talked a little bit about this already. Um but it can be detrimental publishing and predatory journals can be detrimental to the reputation of researchers who publish in them and or the institutions. That um those people work at um you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers can be if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers start your process and you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers end up part way through realizing oh no oh. My gosh this is predatory journal. I don’t want to be submitting here. I gotta i i gotta withdraw that paper well a lot of these journals will ding you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers for a withdrawal fee and sometimes they even if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers pay it. They won’t uh even remove the paper but it’s basically a form of extortion right like haha. We got you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know we’re going to publish this anyway. Too bad for you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers give us 1400 right um and so again there’s difficulty removing the items from journals even if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers never did agree to publish there’s and because and i’ve pointed out that very legitimate studies can be submitted to these journals. There’s a problem with the lack of permanent storage. The lack of permanent spaces for these for this. The information that’s housed in predatory journals. You publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers have a real loss of scholarly information and so you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers may have quality work legitimately good quality work that becomes difficult or impossible to find and again undermines the credibility of science potential for misuse. Um by people oh i see i have a typo there five people with finance and political or financial motivations. Um so what’s the reach right. Um we talked briefly about how many citations these articles can get. But but really what’s what’s a danger here right and so bohannon the same guy john bohannon. He did another study in 2015 where he created a fake article along with the team um where.

They pretended that they’d done this study. And it showed that you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know class that um chocolate aids weight loss um so this this was designed to have very sexy keywords and and all this sort of thing right and they sent out a press release about it and they got picked up by just a whole ton of of media um because of course everybody wants to know that eating chocolate will help you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers lose weight. I mean that would be great right and i think i even remember seeing this story. Come up um on come up on on my own news feeds and but of course it wasn’t real um but it got out there to the media um the and the media didn’t you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know they. They’re not scholars themselves. They see a scholarly study. It looks like it’s published in a legitimate journal. It looks good right like why not. Why can’t we report on this. And so they do. Um so the reach of predatory journals can be very broad very far um if people are willing to put in the effort to do say press releases and and interviews and things like that um and you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know besides that this also clutters up. You publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know when you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers do a search for a topic and there’s just a whole bunch of noise. Well this adds. That’s that’s irrelevant to what you’re looking for. This adds more noise to that more articles that even if they’re obviously bad you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers still have to read through them to identify that they’re obviously bad as opposed to them having been caught as obviously bad and then not published in a scholarly journal. Right so um yeah and then this is uh the result um after the the sting off there uh john bohannon published this thing that said i fooled millions into thinking chocolate helps weight loss and he details the process. I’ve got the link there um but i i mentioned that i saw the the initial chocolate story in the media. I never saw this follow-up um and i don’t know how many other people did um i’ve already talked about the possibility for political and financial motivations so i won’t go over it again so then a question is well.

What areas do predatory publishers target and unfortunately science seems to be the area that they target the most um people who have done studies on the the areas of predatory journals find that over 30 percent are in science followed closely by medicine and health technology and business um in the original article nelson and huffman in 2015. There was more description of like more. Um disciplines were analyzed than this but these were the top four um so people in science and medicine and technology and business need to be extra careful about predatory journals and the existence of predatory journals people in the humanities. Not so much um this is probably related to the fact that science and medicine and health tend to be you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know well-funded and or better funded anyways and humanities tends to often not be funded at all so they don’t tend to have the money that the predatory journals want so why bother targeting them right. That’s that’s my assumption anyways. Um so i’ve been talking about this and when i’ve given this before i’ve had people approach me afterwards and say you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know this is really scary. Um and i want to take some time here to say that this. It’s a problem but it’s not you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know an all-consuming huge problem that’s going to destroy scholarship as we know it. At least not at this phase um and it’s certainly more of a problem in some disciplines than others um and but generally speaking the overall number of predatory journals is low it’s very difficult to say. What percentage of journals are predatory in comparison to non-predatory journals in the brand scheme of things because because there are so many journals that you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers can’t just go around and find out how many there are and then find out how many predatory journals there are and all this sort of thing it’s just. It’s almost impossible to do the one that i mentioned before where there was an area where potentially the number of predatory journals was equivalent or equivalent-ish to the number of legitimate journals.

This was looking within one specific. Um database right so it was you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know whether or not this was reflective of the field overall. Don’t know so there are some estimates that say you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know in this field it’s almost as many predatory journals as non-predatory journals but in other fields. They’re like well this is you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know less than one percent of the journals out there. Um and so the it’s more common that the numbers are low than that the numbers are very high predatory journals. But um so it’s it’s not that dire you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know. That’s what i’m trying to get across here. It’s bad but it’s not dire and even though the numbers but even though the numbers of predatory journals may be small they can and do make their way into scholarly databases now the number of predatory journals and scholarly databases. Which is something. That’s easier to figure out that tends to be very low you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know one percent. Two percent of the absolute most um and in many cases far below one percent of the number of journals in there but they are in there and there are impacts of predatory journals beyond the simple number of them which we’ve talked about through here. There’s trust there’s money there’s reputation so we’ve gone through all of this. How do you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers avoid predatory journals. How do you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers avoid publishing in them. How do you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers avoid citing them. Um so there are different techniques there are lists of predatory journals there are lists of approved journals. There are checklists. The big one critical assessment of information whether you’re looking at the journal on an individual level to figure out whether it’s predatory or whether you’re looking at the article in the journal to trust whether it’s worthwhile um one of the things you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know. Trust your spidey sense. Um but don’t don’t give in to bias right. Don’t assume that a journal is predatory because um it’s doesn’t have the greatest english for example right but do trust so in terms of lists there are some famous lists feels list was the big one.

Um it’s no longer maintained and there were also issues with it which i’ll talk a little bit about. There’s a cabel’s uh cabell has a list of potential predatory journals. This is a subscription database the university of manitoba does not have a subscription to it. Um but maybe one of your colleagues at another institution does there are also lists of approved journals. The directory of open access journals tends to be a good place to look for open access journals particularly now that they have such enhanced rigor after that bohan and sting um there’s also a cabel’s list of approved journals and then you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers can look at curated. Databases like medline. Now as i mentioned some predatory journals can and do get into databases um but in general curated databases you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know. Somebody’s taken the time to look at them and to put the resources that are in there in there so i do want to take a moment to talk about lists. I mentioned that beale’s list was. It was sort of the go-to list for a very long time. There are still mirroring sites that maintain and continue to update deals list but it’s no longer managed by beal. Nobody knows who it’s managed by at this point. Um there’s a real lack of transparency with it. Even when beal was running it he had criteria that he said were used to determine what goes on to to the list but he didn’t go through each journal that he put on there individually and say why it was on there and so it wasn’t always clear and many journals that were on. There you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know rallied against being listed on there and in some cases field did remove them in some cases. He didn’t um there’s also changing situations of publishers. There was a situation a couple of years ago where two very well-known um well-respected long-term uh canadian scholarly journals were purchased by a predatory publisher and the content. Like a bunch of people quit because they realized what was happening.

Um but basically you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know this. This journal used to be good. And now it’s not there’s been the reverse situation where things that use journals that used to appear predatory have really cleaned up their act and are no longer predatory so just because something was on a list at one. Point doesn’t mean it’s still valid for it to be on there. There’s a huge cost of maintenance if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers want to do a list well cabell’s is trying which is why it’s a subscription database but that means it’s not accessible to everybody right um you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers have the chance of something getting on there accidentally and the real the real problem with lists. Is that what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to put give a simple answer. Is this predatory or is it not to a complex question. Um and i know that this isn’t what anybody wants to hear but predatory journals are a spectrum. There are some predatory journals that are extremely predatory and there are some predatory journals where maybe they’re predatory or maybe they’re just inexperienced and you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers don’t know right then you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers have to sort of work things out on an individual basis. So what about these curated databases. What about places like pubmed. Um well pubmed is a database. But there’s also ways that predatory journals can get into pubmed and one of the the ways it’s been documented is pubmed central which is used for researchers who have been given public funds in the united states to put their stuff up on pubmed. But they can any maybe they’ve submitted to a predatory journal and then they post it to pubmed and then that journal is now it appears as though it’s in pubmed so it’s good and legitimate and been put there um through a um a curating process as opposed to how it was really put there which was because of this this pubmed central sort of back door um other databases as i say. They’re a better place to start. But there are a few predatory journals that seem to have snuck in scopus for example has been criticized for having predatory journals in there and you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers can report potential predatory journals but even if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers do and they’ll do an analysis and they’ll say oh.

Okay well this yeah you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers were right to report. This this does look predatory. We’re going to stop accepting submissions from them great but they’re not going to remove the submissions that were there before right so databases are a good place to start but they’re not flawless. So what can you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers do. You publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers want to be careful and you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers want to do things on a case-by-case basis you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers want to do assessments. There are tools available to help you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers think. Check submit for if you’re thinking of submitting to a journal is a good place to start. There are checklists now. One of the things about checklists is that a lot of them are just sort of. They’re not really based on anything. Um there was a long period of time where predatory journals were discussed but there were very few actual studies done on them. Um real studies started being done on predatory journals in larger numbers in about 2017. So it’s still only been about four years even though people have been talking about them since 2010. So there are checklists some of them are better than others. Um the one which i’ll show you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers on the next slide by dadka is probably the best one available right now. I suspect there will be better ones in the future. But this will give you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers a sense of what to look for so if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers take a look at the editorial section um you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers want to see okay. Well what’s the email of the editor. Is it an official email. Is it a general service email or is there no email available and you’ll see that there’s a wait for each of those if it’s an official email good that’s not any points on the predatory scale if it’s a general service email so something like yahoo or gmail and that’s one it’s maybe more of an issue and if the email isn’t available for the editor well that’s a bigger red flag and so each of these are weighted and you’ll get a score and score will be higher or lower based on these things in in the editorial section the review process of publishing um the announcement of information about the journal and oa policies and publication charges.

Um and so what you’ll get if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers fill this out it’s not a yes this journal is predatory or no this journal is not predatory you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers will get a score um and then you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers sort of need to decide whether you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers think this looks too iffy or if it looks okay right. So for instance a general service email you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know they flight that as something but in some countries um institutions. Uh won’t give um you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know like our emails here at umanitoba.ca but that’s not true in all countries right um you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers may have a very legitimate university. But they don’t have their own email server in the same way and so this is a you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know. Maybe that’s not as important as okay. The unclear review process to you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers or or the questionable special issue where it brings in all sorts of content from all sorts of irrelevant or unrelated fields. And this sort of thing but this is probably the best checklist. That’s out there right now. And if you’re just doing a look through and injure you’re thinking of submitting well what are some red flags that you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers might see in a journal that might cause you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers to take a second look right well really low fees for authors um so many of the journals for their author processing charges they charge in my opinion way too much money thousands of dollars sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. But if you’ve got these really affordable fees that’s often that can often be a sign that you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers should take a closer look not necessarily a sign that it’s predatory but a sign that it might be overly broad journal scope so instead of being about um you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know um archaeology it’s about social sciences and sciences or something like that um the next one i think is probably the reddest of red flags which is if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers go to the journal website and the language on the journal website targets authors rather than readers of the journal.

That’s that’s a pretty good sign that it might be predatory and that you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers should take a closer look again. Promises of rapid publication particularly for additional fees um and lack of information on retraction policies manuscript handling and data preservation. This is adapted from another article in nature by mower in 2017. So you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers see these take a closer look. Maybe you’ll find out that. Actually the journal is not predatory it’s fine but maybe not um next slide so basically the key takeaways from this are that predatory journals are a problem. Um they’re not a entire world ending problem. Don’t please. Don’t leave this webinar with that sense. But they are something that you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers should be aware of. And that you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers should pay attention to when you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers are looking at content in predatory journals and when or when you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers are looking at content in journals and when you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers are considering submitting to a journal there are no simple answers um assessment is your best precaution. Another precaution that i didn’t really mention here but that i think is worthwhile. Is that if you’re thinking of submitting to a journal you’re probably thinking of submitting in a field that you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know pretty well because you’ve been doing research in that field and if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers if you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers haven’t heard of the journal maybe there’s a reason you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers haven’t heard of the journal um so you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers might want to consider journals that you’ve used studies from in the past. Um that you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know to be you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know good quality you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers found good studies in them. Maybe that’s your place to start looking for a journal to submit to instead of saying like i’m just going to look up any old open access journal in this field and submit there you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers know um and yeah. There are red flags to watch out for but no single flag absolutely indicates a predatory journal. And even when you’ve put a bunch of flags together it’s still a spectrum and you publishers name, publisher name, name of publishers still have to make a judgment call at some point. Um is this a predatory journal.

Is it just a bad journal. If it’s just a bad journal do i want to submit to it anyways um but yeah predatory journals exist on a spectrum you.

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