Predatory publishers

In connection with the development of open access to scientific information, the activities of a certain group of publishers are also growing. They take advantage of the fact that this new approach is still a novelty in the academic world, and some authors are not yet well informed about it.

When choosing a journal, it is therefore very important to be aware of so-called predatory journals and publishers who try to exploit the OA publication model solely for their business activities, bringing no benefit to the scientific community. Publishing with these publishers often does not involve the traditional peer review process, and the most important part of the entire process is the payment of the publication fee.

We urge authors to take the time to thoroughly evaluate the quality of the journal when engaging in their publication activities.

Questionable Journals

How to recognize a questionable journal? Here are some possible signs of unethical practices:

• Fast peer review process, missing or inadequate peer review.
• Inaccurate information about the impact factor, use of misleading metrics (Global Impact Factor, IndexCopernicus), inaccurate information about journal indexing in databases.
• Soliciting authors with unsolicited emails for article publication or invitations to editorial boards (academic spam).
• Inaccurate or missing information about publication fees.
• General journal names, names similar to reputable journals, interchangeable journal abbreviations, or extensions of well-known names.
• Low percentage of rejected articles.
• Unclear identification of the publisher and editorial board, impossible or difficult contact with the publisher, use of general and free emails.
• Questionable composition of the editorial board.
• Published articles are of low quality without scientific contribution.

Suspicious Conferences

Also, be wary of suspicious conferences, often held only electronically! They can be misleading or even fake (their goal is only to collect registration fees).

How to Protect Yourself?

The efforts of these publishers to gain customers often involve very aggressive marketing approaches. Within the OA community, several mechanisms have been created to highlight these entities.
Probably the best list of so-called “predators” could be found on the Scholarly Open Access portal available at http://scholarlyoa.com/. (the content is further available and expanded at https://beallslist.net). The list includes journals and publishers that may exhibit signs of these unethical practices. The list was maintained by a librarian from Colorado, USA, Jeffrey Beall, who no longer creates the pages.

An excellent helper is also the web service http://thinkchecksubmit.org/, which guides you through the process of recognizing a quality journal, where to publish an electronic book, or how to avoid low-quality conferences.

Extensive material is offered by the Library of the University Campus MU, where individual facts about questionable journals or publishers are thoroughly analyzed and summarized. The material is available on the library’s website.

We ask you, authors who encounter these unethical practices, to send information about this behavior through the contact form on this page. We will use the obtained information for our further analysis and development of the system as a whole.

Further Information:

• Study on Predatory Journals in Scopus (http://idea.cerge-ei.cz/publikace)
• Academic Antipredator (http://antipredator.vedazije.cz/)

I hope this helps! If you need any more assistance, feel free to ask.

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