Predatory Journals: think before you submit

As a reader of this journal, you almost certainly have now been, or continue to be barraged daily by, a deluge of junk emails actively soliciting your latest paper. Promises are made of both rapid times to decision and expeditious publication – all for a reasonably priced fee (of course). Such promises seem unbelievable – and they are precisely that! Or, at least if they deliver on posting your article within 48 hours or so, it certainly has not been filed with all the usual indexing databases and is no more “published” than if a random stranger simply hosted it on their website or personal blog. You may also have received a “tempting” offer to participate on the editorial board for a journal you never even knew existed from an editor who almost certainly does not exist. Some of these email tempters are clearly written by individuals struggling with functional illiteracy (though it is equally questionable as to how much human intervention there has been in the production of these emails) and you likely dispatch such entreaties to the trash bin without a second thought. Other messages, however, seem more plausible and legitimate. Either way, you have entered the murky world of predatory journals. What is a predatory journal? Definitions are elusive, though Moher and Moher recently summed them up neatly by suggesting such publications can, perhaps, be characterized by their behavior: aggressive recruitment emails, unrealistic promises regarding publication, and ultimately worthless peer review. They can perhaps also be defined by the honesty of their intent and remit. In short, many are nothing more than a giant publishing fraud. Fake journals that will not provide any scientific peer review, no indexing of your article in databases such as PubMed, no proper production of a paper and no plan to ensure your article is preserved in perpetuity as part of the published record, all steps a legitimate publisher would undertake. I cannot be clearer: many of these journals are little more than a scam offering zero validity to the articles they publish. Even if your article was authentic, the very act of publishing it in one of these fake titles has just rendered your article valueless, unusable and illegitimate. There is one qualifier to all this, lest I be accused of overblown rhetoric. It does seem that there are journals, many home-grown and developed in emerging markets for authors in those very same markets that have been lumped in with the aggressively predatory. Clearly in such instances that term is a misnomer or, at least, insufficiently discriminate. The intent of the some of the local, small-scale, efforts is obviously good, though poor execution means such publications do appear to be predatory. So, just like the Nigerian Prince who since the late 1990s has been looking for help in banking his dollars, no one would be fooled by this ruse, right? Wrong. Indeed, so wrong that this is now an underground publishing market (that is highly visible above ground, as it were) worth US $74m per annum according to a recent study. Sure, many of the papers these journals publish are drawn from the same parts of the world where the predatory journals appear to originate or from authors with no track record and a desperate need to get published, but if you look closely, you will find papers from professors at Ivy League colleges, elegantly conducted randomized controlled trials or systematic reviews and even reports from government agencies all “published” in predatory journals. While attempting to define predatory journals it is important to clarify one common misperception: while predatory journals are almost always Open Access, most Open Access journals are far from predatory. Indeed, the majority of Open Access titles are either owned by, or published by, respectable academic societies and legitimate publishers.