"Predatory journals—also called fraudulent, deceptive, or pseudo-journals—are publications that claim to be legitimate scholarly journals, but misrepresent their publishing practices. Some common forms of predatory publishing practices include falsely claiming to provide peer review, hiding information about Article Processing Charges (APCs), misrepresenting members of the journal’s editorial board, and other violations of copyright or scholarly ethics" (Elmore & Weston, 2020). Because predatory publishers do not follow the proper academic standards for publishing, they usually offer a quick turnaround on publishing a manuscript.
In contrast, high-quality academic journals take longer to publish articles because they go through a proper peer review and copy-editing process.
Open Access journals may solicit authors to publish for a fee, but maintain high standards for peer review and editing. The goal of Open Access publishing is to disseminate research to a larger audience by removing paywalls. Open Access journals can have Impact Factors and can create a citation advantage for authors.
1. Do you or your colleagues know the journal? Do you recognize the editorial board?
2. Can you easily contact the publisher?
3. Is the journal clear about its peer review process?
4. Is it clear what fees will be charged?
5. Is the publisher a well known publisher (Wiley, Blackwell, Elseiver, Saunders, Francis & Taylor, Sage, Emerald, Oxford, Brill) or a university press?
If the answer is no for any of these questions, the journal is most likely questionable, if not predatory.
Checklists & Resources to help you spot predatory publishers, conferences, & journals:
Resist too-good-to-be-true-offers. Trust your instincts! If something smells fishy it probably is, as they say!
There isn't one foolproof way to determine if a journal is predatory. It requires a bit of detective work. Here are a few places you can search to determine the quality of an open-access journal.
As of 2015, there were an estimated 996 predatory publishers (including 447 publishers of standalone journals) that published over 11,800 journals. Of those, roughly 8,000 journal titles were active and published a total of approximately 420,000 articles. For comparison, this is roughly the same size, in both journal titles and articles published, as the legitimate open-access publishing industry. Not all of these predatory journals are in biomedicine fields, but biomedicine is a major area for predatory publishers, and the prevalence of predatory journals varies between specific fields. (Shen and Bjork)
Roughly 15% of articles published in predatory journals are from United States authors. However, this accounts for less than 1% of the United States' total research output. (Umlauf and Mochizuki)