Guide to Open Access Publishing

Predatory Academic Practice 

This practice includes activities such as publishing and conferencing that exploit academic research output for financial gain to the detriment of the academics, researchers and their institutions.

Predatory publishing exploits the principles of Open Access by profiting from a researchers' need to publish and distribute their research. These publishers often charge lower article processing charges (APCs), provide little or no peer review, and promise remarkably short publishing times.  One of their key characteristics is the limited contact information provided.

Common characteristics of predatory practice:

• Their primary goal is to make money (i.e. there will be fees).
• They do not care about the quality of the work published (i.e. no or little editing or peer-review).
• They make false claims or promises (i.e. claims of impact factors and indexing).
• They engage in unethical business practices (i.e. not as advertised).
• They fail to follow accepted standards or best practices of scholarly publishing (various).

(O'Donnell, 2012)

Beall’s list of predatory journals, publishers and metrics

While Beall's lists are no longer managed by Beall, they have been archived online since 2016

• Predatory standalone journals
• Predatory publishers
• Highjacked journals
• Misleading metrics 

The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science (March, 2021)

Systematic manipulation of the publishing process via “paper mills”

Paper Mills- A Rising Concern in the Academic Community (September, 2021)

Paper Mills: a threat to academic integrity

Potential “paper mills” and what to do about them – a publisher’s perspective

The full-service paper mill and its Chinese customers (January, 2020)

Paper mills and on-demand publishing: Risks to the integrity of journal indexing and metrics (January, 2021)

NRF Statement on Predatory Journals & Deceptive Publishers (2017)

DHET Research Output Policy (2015)

Predatory publishers are corrupting open access (2012)

Beall's list of Predatory Journals

Beall's list of Hijacked Journals

Stop Predatory Journals (List) 

Publishers grapple with an invisible foe as huge organised fraud hits scientific journals (2021)

Unethical Practices in Research and Publishing: Evidence from Russia (2021)

Predatory publishing and predatory journals: a critical review and proposed research agenda for higher education (2020)

OSI - Deceptive Publishing (2019)

Identifying predatory and pseudo-journals

Withdrawal of a Publication Submitted to a Predatory Journal

Predatory journals in the firing line (2019)

Russian journals retract more than 800 papers after ‘bombshell’ investigation (2020)

Research published in pay-and-publish journals won’t count (June 2019)

“Predatory” vs trustworthy journals: What do they mean for the integrity of science? (2018)

The business of fake science (2018)

The extent of South African authored articles in predatory journals (2017)

Removing content from Google

Fraudulent metrics are identified by the following criteria:

• Limited information is provided such as physical location, staff and managers and institutional affiliation
• The metrics generated are not based on unscientific or contrived methods.
• Google algorithms are sometimes used to determine metrics, which do not distinguish between publishing formats and may include blog posts, social media posts, magazines, newspaper articles, predatory journals as well as legitimate academic journals.
• Journals pay for the metrics service.
• The purpose of the metrics service is to profit from journals.
• Predatory journals usually list fraudulent metrics services on the websites along with other legitimate indexing services.