Predatory Journals

Signs of a Predatory Journal

Predatory journals exploit the open access publishing model funded by APC fees and, for their own profit, lower the quality of publishing and editorial services—or abandon them altogether.

They are characterized by the following:

• they send out “academic spam” – the publisher actively and widely approaches authors by email and lures them into publishing,
• they have a questionable editorial board or unclear contact information for the editors/publisher,
• they may operate under a stolen identity of a prestigious journal (a similar or even identical journal title and website design),
• the text of the article submitted for publication does not undergo the usual peer-review process, resulting in suspiciously fast publication,
• authors pay an article processing charge that is not clearly stated or changes during the publishing process,
• they provide false information about their impact factor and indexing in various prestigious databases.

American librarian Jeffrey Beall from the University of Colorado specialized, starting in 2010, in identifying suspicious academic open access journals and publishers associated with “predatory practices.” He is credited with coining the terms “predatory publisher” and “predatory journal.” On his website, he published the results of his investigations until January 2017, after which the list was removed. .

Is the Journal You Plan to Publish In Trustworthy?

To help you decide about your publishing activities and verify whether a journal may be predatory, you can use the website Think. Check. Submit.