Predatory Journals: An Ethical Crisis in Publishing

Publishing at Any Cost? The Need for the Improvement of the Quality of Scholarly Publications

“…Furthermore, contrary to what could be expected, it may happen that many university students, even at the graduate level, are not very familiar or particularly concerned with these quality issues of scientific publication (Liyanapathirana, 2019;Santos & Serpa, 2017). Cress and Sarwer (2019) argue that education is critical in preventing predatory journals to thrive at the expense of researchers that need to publish, and the traditional publishers have to reaffirm, based on their reputation and knowledge, their hegemony in the scholarly publishing field.…”

“…Despite the difficulty in defining them , they can be characterised, in general, as journals whose first and last goal is profit, frequently through the payment of a publication fee or charge that is characteristic of most Journals that operate in open-access, albeit not exclusively (Teixeira da Silva & Tsigaris, 2018). To attain this purpose, the manuscripts are not subject to serious peer review and, consequently, the quality of what is published is not a purpose of these journals (Ross-White et al, 2019;Watson, 2019;Teixeira da Silva & Tsigaris, 2018;Cress & Sarwer, 2019).…”

“…Burggren et al (2018) advocate that, instead of using complex metrics, evaluation committees, whether for merit, promotion or tenure, should base their assessments on the quality of the work published, as well as the quality of the journal itself. This would lead to a redefinition in terms of the choice of the journals to publish in on the part of academics (Shaghaei et al, 2018;Teixeira da Silva & Tsigaris, 2018;Cress & Sarwer, 2019;Severin & Low, 2019).…”

Predatory journals as threats to the academic publishing: a review

“…Despite the difficulty in defining them (Cobey et al, 2019), their goal can be characterized, in general, is profit, frequently through the payment of a publication fee or charge that is characteristic of most journals that operate in open-access, albeit not exclusively (Teixeira da Silva & Tsigaris, 2018). To attain this purpose, the manuscripts are not subjected to serious peer review and, consequently, the quality of what is published is not a purpose of these journals (Ross-White et al, 2019;Watson, 2019;Teixeira da Silva & Tsigaris, 2018;Cress & Sarwer, 2019). The criteria to identify Predatory open access publishing are that they are accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control (Stratford , 2012) , aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or serve on editorial boards (Butler , 2013), listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission (Elliott , 2012), appointing fake academics to editorial boards (Neumann, 2012), mimicking the name or web site style of more established journals (Kolata , 2013), making misleading claims about the publishing operation, such as a false Journal of Agriculture and Natural Resources (2021) 4(2): 1-10 ISSN: 2661-6270 (Print), ISSN: 2661-6289 (Online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.3126/janr.v4i2.33640 location (Elliott , 2012) and citing fake and non-existing (or non existing) impact factors (Beall , 2014) .They promise a high Impact Factor and a high number of citations, claiming their journals are influential and field leaders (Anonymous, 2020a).…”

Authors beware! Publishing in predatory journals is harmful

“…Without peer review, they publish the paper. These predatory journals are not indexed, generally do not have an Impact Factor, and typically have poor reputations in the community (Cress & Sarwer, 2019). Predatory journals also have misleading and flawed index (https://predatoryjournals.com/metrics).…”