Publisher Package and Open Access Journals: Are Any of Them Predatory?

Evaluation of untrustworthy journals: Transition from formal criteria to a complex view

“…Although the databases Web of Science, Scopus, and DOAJ are recommended as whitelists (Erfanmanesh & Pourhossein, 2017;Gasparyan et al, 2015;Kumar & Saxena, 2016;McCann & Polacsek, 2018;Nolfi et al, 2015;Yan et al, 2018), they cannot be used because journals from Beall's list also appear in these databases (Macháček & Srholec, 2017;Shamseer et al, 2017;Somoza-Fernández, Rodríguez-Gairín, & Urbano, 2016;Sorokowski, Kulczycki, Sorokowska, & Pisanski, 2017;Strinzel, Severin, Milzow, & Egger, 2019). Beall's list can also be challenged due to a lack of transparency, the incomplete nature of his list, and his prejudice against journals from the Global South (Berger, 2017;Bloudoff-Indelicato, 2015;Crawford, 2014;Gasparyan et al, 2015;Huffman, 2017;Olivarez et al, 2018;Teixeira da Silva & Tsigaris, 2018;Umlauf & Mochizuki, 2018) the doubts cast on the suitability of the abovementioned databases as whitelists remain (Neylon, 2017). This is confirmed by studies evaluating how journals comply with various criteria.…”

“…However, the authors themselves simultaneously noted that some criteria are subjective. For example, untrustworthy journals are associated with a review process marked ‘quick’ or of a length of 2–3 weeks, but this claim was not supported by any research (Beall, ; Huffman, ; Masten & Ashcraft, ; Newland, ; Tosti & Maddy, ; Yan et al ., ). Equally questionable is the length of the review process based on the analysis of its usual duration (Nguyen et al ., ; Wicherts, ) because, while writing a review may only take a couple of hours, the whole length of the peer review process is also influenced by searching for a suitable peer reviewer or by the fact that the reviewer and editor are otherwise occupied (Huisman & Smits, ; McGlinchey, ; Schmidt, Ross‐Hellauer, van Edig, & Moylan, ).…”

“…Other studies suggest basing the journal evaluation on various criteria, such as the length of the review process, accurate information about the journal's indexing in one of the above‐mentioned databases, and so on (Berger, ; Bowman, Saultz, & Phillips, ; Cobey et al ., ; Erfanmanesh & Pourhossein, ; Gasparyan, Yessirkepov, Diyanova, & Kitas, ; Hill, ; Kumar & Saxena, ; McCann & Polacsek, ; Power, ). Librarians should help authors in this evaluation process (Eve & Priego, ; Hansoti et al ., ; Huffman, ; Nolfi, Lockhart, & Myers, ; Olivarez et al ., ) as they are among the experts who are presently attempting to develop methods for journal evaluation (McCann & Polacsek, ; Rele, Kennedy, & Blas, ; Teixeira da Silva, ; Tosti & Maddy, ). Unfortunately, the evaluation process is yet to be standardized, and some of the attributes used to uncover predatory publishers and journals have been called into question (Cobey et al ., ; Teixeira da Silva, ; Yan et al ., ).…”

Publishing in predatory tourism and hospitality journals: Mapping the academic market and identifying response strategies

“…Bartholomew, 2014; Darbyshire et al., 2017; Pearson, 2016; Pickler et al., 2015). Most predatory journals are either multidisciplinary in nature or pertaining to the fields of science, medicine, and technology (Huffman, 2017; Shen and Björk, 2015). Arguably, this explains why predatory publishing has received far more attention among academics in medical and applied sciences than in social sciences.…”

“…Research indicates that the number of predatory journals has increased from about 1800 journals in 2010 to around 8000 journals in 2014 (Shen and Björk, 2015). As forecasted by Huffman (2017), if this trend continues, there could be 37,500 predatory journals and 7500 predatory publishers by 2022.…”