Avoiding Predatory Publishers

Dr Seye Babatunde
 Predatory Publishers
• ‘Predatory publishers use deception to appear
legitimate, entrapping researchers into
submitting their work and then charging them
to publish it’ 7

• ––’exploit the author-pays model of open-

access publishing for their own profit’ 7
 Outline
• Description of a predatory publisher
• Attributes of the Predatory Publisher
• History of Predatory Publishing
• What can you do?
 Predatory Publishers
• ‘spam professional e-mail lists to solicit
manuscripts and editorial board memberships’
7

• – ‘operate with a false-front or non-existent

peer review process’ 7
• – ‘pay little attention to digital preservation’ 7
• ‘Imposter publishers create fake websites of
real journals and collect money from authors
without even publishing the work’ 7
 Attributes of the Predatory
Publisher
• Editorial board members without affiliation,
experience or contact detail
• Have the same board for more than one
journal
• Include scholars on an editorial board without
their knowledge
• Have no policies or practices for digital
preservation
 Predatory Publisher Cont
• large fleet of journals, often using a template
of an existing journal to quickly create each
journal’s home page
• Falsely claim to have an impact factor
• Use spam e-mail requesting peer reviews from
scholars unqualified to review submitted
manuscripts
 Predatory Publisher Cont
• Falsely claim to have the publisher’s content
indexed in legitimate abstracting and indexing
services
• Falsely claim to have a peer review process
• Evidence of repeated cases of plagiarism
• Poorly maintained websites including dead
links & grammatical errors
 Predatory Publisher Cont
• Publish broad journals and combine fields not
normally treated together e.g. International
Journal of Business, Humanities and
Technology
• Lack of published article retraction policy, no
corrections are published
 Predatory Publisher Cont
• Use e-mail addresses that ends in .gmail.com,
.yahoo.com or other free e-mail suppliers
• Display prominent statements that promise
rapid publication, quick review
• Focus on authors (not readers) and on getting
their fees, providing no value adds to readers
such as RSS feeds, hot-linked references, links
to data
 Predatory Publisher Cont
• Require immediate copyright transfer on
submission
• Tangled web. The location of a journal's
publisher, editor, and bank account are often
continents apart.
 History of Predatory Publishers
• 2008, Richard Poynder's interview series
• 2010 Phil Davis (editor of the Scholarly Kitchen
blog) submitted a manuscript consisting of
computer-generated jagons
• 2010 Jeffrey Belle (Colarado)
 List of Predatory Publishers
• Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory publishers
• The example below was copied from
www.csir.co.za 8
 Check List
• Do you or your colleagues know the journal?

• Can you easily identify and contact the

publisher?

• Is the journal clear about the type of peer

review it uses?
 Check List

• Are articles indexed in services that you use?

• Is it clear what fees will be charged?

• Do you recognise the editorial board?

 Check List

• Is the publisher a member of a recognized

industry initiative?
• World Association of Medical Editors
• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
• Directory of Open Access Journals
What can you Do?
 References
• Predatory publishers: the bane of open access
publishing. Carina van Zyl, CSIR. Presentation
at the 12th Biennial Southern African Online
Information Meeting (SAOIM), 3-6 June 2014,
CSIR ICC, Pretoria, SA. Go to session 2 at
http://saoug.org.za/saoim2014-workshops-
and-conference-presentations
Thank you for listening!