Publishing Ethics and Predatory Practices: A Dilemma for All Stakeholders of Science Communication

Abstract

Publishing scholarly articles in traditional and newly-launched journals is a responsible task, requiring diligence from authors, reviewers, editors, and publishers. The current generation of scientific authors has ample opportunities for publicizing their research. However, they have to selectively target journals and publish in compliance with the established norms of publishing ethics. Over the past few years, numerous illegitimate or predatory journals have emerged in most fields of science. By exploiting gold Open Access publishing, these journals paved the way for low-quality articles that threatened to change the landscape of evidence-based science. Authors, reviewers, editors, established publishers, and learned associations should be informed about predatory publishing practices and contribute to the trustworthiness of scholarly publications. In line with this, there have been several attempts to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate journals by blacklisting unethical journals (the Jeffrey Beall's list), issuing a statement on transparency and best publishing practices (the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association's and other global organizations' draft document), and tightening the indexing criteria by the Directory of Open Access Journals. None of these measures alone turned to be sufficient. All stakeholders of science communication should be aware of multiple facets of unethical practices and publish well-checked and evidence-based articles.

Problems and challenges of predatory journals

“…Predatory journals often mimic titles or logos of prestigious, well‐known journals to confuse less experienced researchers 35, 36. The titles of such journals often sound quite ambitious and include words such as ‘Innovative’, ‘World’, ‘International’, ‘Global’, ‘American’, or ‘European’, covering almost all scientific areas 37.…”

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'.…”

Debasing the Currency of Science: The Growing Menace of Predatory Open Access Journals

“…It is true that any shake-up of the scientific publishing world may generate some collateral credibility damage to all journals, but we feel that this is far preferable to the mortal credibility danger posed by the continuing existence and spread of predatory OA journals. Views similar to ours have recently been expressed in the Journal of Korean Medical Science (Barroga 2015, Gasparyan et al 2015.…”