Opportunistic Journals in the Clinical Pharmacology Space

“Predatory journal” is the customary term, but “opportunistic journal” is more accurate. The situation that we face is a product of economic opportunity in a free-market economy. Profit is to be made through business enterprises founded to fill a need for a product or service that people are willing to pay for. In addition, an awards system has been put into place by some foreign governments based only on having a publication in a journal.1 Entrepreneurs of predatory journals have stepped forward to fill these “needs,” apparently with substantial success. The problem is that the legitimate biomedical publication process, and the system of merit-based peer-review used by academic medical and scientific journals, are collateral damage. The opportunistic journal system is well documented and chronicled, starting with the pioneering work of Jeffrey Beall of the University of Denver.2–6 At least 1000 companies are now involved in opportunistic biomedical publishing, and the number increases continuously. Estimates of the number of individual journals range from 2000 to 8000, and an estimated 400,000 papers are published annually in these journals. Many of the identified journals have published only a few issues, and in many cases an “issue” contains only one or two scientific papers. Some of the journals are now inactive or closed down, and some have never actually published an issue. Many of these journals will accept manuscripts with little or no peer review, no documentation of human subjects protection, and even overt falsification of data.7 The business model for opportunistic publishers is also well-documented. The majority of publishers maintain offices and telephone numbers in the United States. The offices can be tracked to storefronts in cities or suburban malls. However the actual publishing operations are for the most part located in Asian nations where labor costs are low. Sadly, it is not only opportunistic publishers that are involved in publishing these journals, but more mainstream publishers are involved as well.7,8 The process of promoting an opportunistic journal involves aggregation of E-mail addresses of potential author recruits, acquired through scans of legitimate biomedical publications. Mass electronic mailings aggressively solicit submissions of manuscripts, promising rapid peer-review, rapid open-access publication of accepted manuscripts, and extensive exposure of “your esteemed research” to the biomedical community.9 The undersigned authors (DJG and JSB) typically receive as many as 20 such solicitations per day, with the text of the communications bearing themark of unedited writing by an individual whose native language is not English orWestern.Manuscript solicitations often include invitations to join the Editorial Board as well. Individual publishers operate multiple journals – sometimes numbering in the hundreds – thereby expanding the profit opportunity with minimal additional operating cost. Individual scientists may end up being listed on one of these journal web sites without their approval or knowledge, as a lack of response to an invitation may be taken as a positive response. After acceptance, authors are expected to pay an “article processing cost” or “handling fee,” often in the thousands of U. S. dollars. The costs are generally