|
 
 |
| EDITORIAL |
|
| Year : 2022 | Volume
: 10
| Issue : 1 | Page : 1 |
|
Predatory journals – Putting your hard works in garbage
Fawaz Pullishery
Department of Community Dental Practice, Faculty of Dentistry, Batterjee Medical College, Jeddah, KSA
| Date of Submission | 29-Oct-2022 |
| Date of Decision | 02-Nov-2022 |
| Date of Acceptance | 04-Nov-2022 |
| Date of Web Publication | 31-Dec-2022 |
Correspondence Address:
Fawaz Pullishery
Department of Community Dental Practice, Faculty of Dentistry, Batterjee Medical College, Jeddah
KSA
 Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None  | Check |
DOI: 10.4103/dmr.dmr_36_22
How to cite this article:
Pullishery F. Predatory journals – Putting your hard works in garbage. Dent Med Res 2022;10:1 |
Authors that submit to open access journals may be asked to pay to publish, but the publications' editorial and review processes are rigorous. One of the main tenets of open access publishing is the elimination of paywalls in an effort to make scientific findings accessible to a wider audience. Authors who publish in open access journals may benefit from higher statistics and higher impact factors.[1] Predatory journals exploit authors by demanding payment for publication without offering any editorial or peer review services. Predatory publishers typically advertise fast turnaround on publishing a work, although they do not adhere to the appropriate academic guidelines for publishing.[2] High-quality academic publications, on the other hand, require more time since each paper must go through a rigorous and comprehensive peer review and copy-editing procedure before being published.[3] The integrity of researchers and the academic journals that publish their work is of the utmost importance, as dishonest behavior on either side may significantly impede the development of new scientific knowledge.
A librarian at the University of Colorado named Jeffrey Beall began compiling a list of “potential, likely, or probably predatory scholarly open access publishers” on his own blog titled Scholarly Open Access in 2008. This list, widely known as “Beall's List,” compiled publications with questionable ethics based on a predetermined set of criteria. As of October 2022, Beall's List has 1163 confirmed potential predatory publishers and about 163 doubtful publishers.[4]
Predatory journals share a number of common characteristics, including (a) poor peer review, in which claims of a thorough peer review process are made but no evidence that any peer review is carried out, and no evidence of selectivity or screening based on an editorial or quality checks as all submissions appear to be accepted. (b) faked editorial boards, which may include members who have not given their consent to be on the board and/or whose relationships with the board are not easily verifiable. (c) false promises of indexing in prominent journal indexes, including PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus Journals that inflate their Google Scholar citation metrics by publishing false claims of high “Impact Factors” and excessively high self-citation rates, (d) faked addresses for the journal's offices, which are often located in the United States or the United Kingdom but whose offered postcodes do not correspond to the actual postal code for that region. However, Beall's list and other lists, such as Cabell's list and the Directory Open Access Journal list, do not agree on whether journals are more likely to be predatory or legitimate.[5],[6] To alert the academic community about predatory publishers, the term “Predatory journal” was first used in 2010. Since then, hundreds of articles and more than 56 studies have been published on the topic. The “Think. Check. Submit.” initiative was created by scientific organizations and publishers (including Springer Nature) to aid authors. But it is not sufficient.
| References | |  |
| 1. | Škorić L, Vrkić D, Petrak J. Current state of open access to journal publications from the University of Zagreb School of medicine. Croat Med J 2016;57:71-6.  |
| 2. | Shen C, Björk BC. 'Predatory' open access: A longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics. BMC Med 2015;13:230. |
| 3. | Kelly J, Sadeghieh T, Adeli K. Peer review in scientific publications: Benefits, critiques, & a survival guide. EJIFCC 2014;25:227-43. |
| 4. | Beall's List – Of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers. Available from: https://beallslist.net. [Last accessed on 2022 Oct 24]. |
| 5. | Strinzel M, Severin A, Milzow K, Egger M. Blacklists and whitelists to tackle predatory publishing: A cross-sectional comparison and thematic analysis. mBio 2019;10:e00411-19. |
| 6. | da Silva JA, Tsigaris P. What value do journal whitelists and blacklists have in academia? J Acad Librariansh 2018;44:781-92. |
|
Search Pubmed for