Predatory publishing

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The term predatory publishing is used to define a type of publishing that exploits the need of researchers to publish quickly, with the false promise of fast peer-reviews and rapid time to publication and wide dissemination. The goal of predatory publishing is not to disseminate scientific research results through Open Access, although it exploits its logic, but is to make money by deceiving academics, offering services of little or no quality, and hiding behind the form of Open Access as an ethical way of doing research.

These types of publishers through aggressive, opaque and sometimes fraudulent strategies propose to the often novice authors to publish their work in open access journals, profiting from Article Processing Charge (APC) revenues.

It is often not immediate to recognize predatory publishers because they create websites containing entirely realistic electronic journals. They may also declare Impact Factors (or indicators that bear a resemblance to IF) that later turn out to be bogus or falsely claim to be indexed in recognized databases, such as Scopus, Web of Science, Pubmed.

Some tips for authors and reviewers of scholarly publications

• Pay attention to the quality of journals and publishing websites
  Before submitting a contribution, it is useful to check the professionalism and quality of the actual publishing offerings, checking where the content is indexed (databases, directories ...) and paying attention to false impact factors.

• Check publishers' subject areas
  A newly formed publisher is unlikely to cover all disciplinary areas.
  One should, therefore, carefully scrutinize proposals from new or purported publishers who publish online periodicals covering a very broad disciplinary spectrum.

• Check ethics in reviewing and selecting content
  Peer review or acceptance too quickly, or secured by "default" in a very short time, should give pause for thought. An editorial/scientific board that is small, or not properly defined in its composition, may be synonymous with low quality.
• Demand transparency of publication costs
  Traditional publication costs, or for Open Access APC, should be disclosed prior to submission of any content or acceptance of a publication. Costs should be clearly stated and easily searchable on the publisher's website.

What to do to guard against "predatory publishers"

It is imperative that an author who wants to properly disseminate the results of his or her publicly funded research perform some simple checking activities before submitting his or her work to a publisher:

• consult DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), the directory that indexes quality, accredited scientific and scholarly open access journals, to see if the journal in which you are considering publishing is listed there;
• consult OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association), the website of the Open Access Publishers Association, to make sure that the publisher publishing the journal of interest is listed there;
• check that the journal has the essential identifying elements (ISSN, DOI... link alla relativa pagina in inglese sugli identificatori univoci);
• find clear information regarding peer review performed by the journal;
• track down indications on the journal's website regarding any costs required to publish an open access article;
• check whether the journal is indexed on recognized citation databases (Scopus, Web of Science or other more discipline-specific ones). This shrewdness is important but less reliable than others (at least on its own, it would not indicate much), because increasingly "predatory publishers" are also being surveyed there and, in many cases, have false bibliometric indexes.

In case of doubt...

We recommend further investigation of the journal's trustworthiness and credibility in relation to the scientific-editorial committee, public information and author communication methods, platform management and publishing practices.

A useful tool for checking publisher reliability is Think Check Submit, a valuable tool that, through a checklist, guides an informed choice of journal. On the specially created website, a series of questions are presented for the researcher to answer to check whether the journals under consideration are trustworthy, such as whether the editorial board is composed of known scholars, whether the journal is indexed in a major database, or whether it is part of some recognized association (e.g., DOAJ if it is open-access).

More information

• Alan H. Chambers, How I became easy prey to a predatory publisher (Science 2019)
  Predatory journals: no definition, no defence (Nature, 2019)
• John Bohannon, Who's Afraid of Peer Review? (Science 2013)
• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
• Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)