Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing: The Romanian Connection

Abstract

Not so long ago, a well institutionalized predatory journal exposed itself by publishing a hoax article that blew the whistle for its devastating influence on the academic affairs of a small country. This paper puts that experiment in context, gives all the important details and analyzes the results. The experiment was inspired by well-known cases of scientific activism and is in line with recent efforts against predatory publishers. The paper presents the evidence in detail and uses it to analyze the publishing practices of the offending journal, using established criteria for assessing predatory publications. That journal somehow acquired an impact factor and charged money to publish thousands of "scientific" papers without any peer review. Since the impact factor is the major official evaluation criteria for scientists in Serbia, these papers disturbed the whole academic evaluation process. Credentials acquired by those publications form a strong obstacle to institutionalized reasoned efforts against such practices. This case warns the whole community of the long lasting damage when journals with low publishing ethics are taken seriously.

Publishing in predatory open access journals: Authors' perspectives

“…Our finding agrees with other literature that most (62.5%) of the authors domicile in developing and low‐income countries, which is probably due to the pressure on authors to publish and perhaps a lack of understanding about journal selection (Djuric, ). The variety of methods that are used to promote journals to authors was of interest – although the high incidence of email invitation and online searches show a naivety in the ways to identify quality venues for research publication.…”

extent of South African authored articles in predatory journals

“…The first are scholarly publications that analyse the nature and dynamics of predatory publishing. Included in this category are studies by Bohannon 3 , Bowman 4 , Djuric 5 , Gasparyan et al 6 , Jalalian and Mahboobi 7 , Kozak et al 8 , Nelson and Huffman 9 , Shen 10 , Sipka 11 , Svab and Makivic 12 , Tin et al 13 and Xia et al 14,15 Arguably the most comprehensive of these is a report in 2012 by Truth 16 entitled 'Pay big to publish fast: Academic journal rackets'.…”

Predatory Publishers using Spamming Strategies for Call for Papers and Review Requests : A Case Study

“…At the same time, researchers who publish in the predatory journals (being deceived or) use the scarcer research funds, which end by supporting the proliferation of predatory publishers 7 . Despite the fact that after the public exposure of their lack of quality control in the peer review process 8,9 and selection of the editorial board 10 researchers can no longer be trapped and some of them reinvented as proofing services 11 , the number of predatory publishers is still growing 12 and their strategies are evolving 13 .…”