Library and Academic Services: Peer Review: Predatory Journals

Predatory Journals

The shift to making research open access has had the unintended consequence of publishers shifting the way they do business. Now, authors are expected to pay the publisher to publish their article - as much as $3,000-5,000 per article.

Predatory publishers see this as an opportunity to make money off of young, inexperienced scholarly authors.

So, how does this affect you?

While most predatory journals don't find their way into databases (and there are problems there for the authors), enough do - you may also encounter them if you are searching using Google Scholar or just the web.

they are not typically peer-reviewed (even if they say they are) -- they, therefore, are of questionable quality
they may be used to hide conflicts of interest -- authors could be using this publishing platform on purpose to hide fraudulent intent
and more so, they can be hard to identify.

The following links are helpful to understand the effects of predatory publishing and how to identify predatory journals.

Problems and challenges of predatory journals
An article written by G Richtig, et al. about predatory publishing and its effects on scholarly authors.
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Richtig, G., Berger, M., Lange‐Asschenfeldt, B., Aberer, W., & Richtig, E. (2018). Problems and challenges of predatory journals. Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, 32(9), 1441-1449. doi:10.1111/jdv.15039
Predatory Publishing (Wikipedia)
Get a comprehensive overview of Predatory publishing.
Stop Predatory Journals - List of Predatory Journals
This is a list of possibly predatory journals. The kernel for this list was extracted from the archive of Beall’s list at web.archive.org. It will be updated as new information or suggested edits are submitted or found by the maintainers of this site.
Black & White Response in a Gray Area: Faculty and Predatory Publishing
Conference proceedings from the 2019 ACRL Conference about the practices of Predatory publishing.
Teaching Nursing Students and Nurses About Predatory Publishing
(from the abstract)
"Nurse educators must teach nursing students and nurses about the differences between reputable nursing journals and those produced by predatory publishers. Although there are several differences between reputable and predatory nursing journals, the lack of adequate peer review is an important problem. An active teaching strategy is provided that nurse educators may use to facilitate learning about reputable and predatory nursing journals."
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Ashton, K. (2019). Teaching Nursing Students and Nurses About Predatory Publishing. Journal of Nursing Education, 58(11), 627–632.
(Available in print in the RRC Library)
It's called predatory publishing for a reason
One of the outcomes of the open access publishing phenomenon has been the proliferation of what has come to be known as predatory journals. This represents a growing number of journals provided by Internet-generated opportunists that solicit researchers to submit fee-based articles for “journals” they claim to control.
An Education Session Developed in Response to Low Health Professional Awareness of Predatory Journals
This paper describes an education session delivered to health professionals throughout the province of X. Developed in response to health professionals’ low awareness of predatory journals, it was designed to raise awareness and to provide tools and techniques to critically appraise the scholarly literature.

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