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Dangerous Predatory Publishers Threaten Medical Research OPINION Editing, Writing & Publishing http://dx.doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2016.31.10.1511 • J Korean Med Sci 2016; 31: 1511-1513 Dangerous Predatory Publishers Threaten Medical Research Jeffrey Beall This article introduces predatory publishers in the context of biomedical sciences research. It describes the characteristics of predatory publishers, including spamming and using fake Auraria Library, University of Colorado, Denver, CO, metrics, and it describes the problems they cause for science and universities. Predatory USA journals often fail to properly manage peer review, allowing pseudo-science to be Received: 14 July 2016 published dressed up as authentic science. Academic evaluation is also affected, as some Accepted: 14 July 2016 researchers take advantage of the quick, easy, and cheap publishing predatory journals provide. By understanding how predatory publishers operate, researchers can avoid Address for Correspondence: Jeffrey Beall, MA, MSLS becoming victimized by them. Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver, 1100 Lawrence St. Denver, Co 80204, USA E-mail: [email protected] Keywords: Predatory Publishing; Publication Ethics; Science Communication; Periodicals as Topic; Editorial Policies DIAGNOSIS: PREDATORY PUBLISHERS into the journal titles to attract submissions from authors need- ing a publication in an international journal. As mentioned, they You probably have received many spam emails from unfamiliar use spam email to solicit article submissions, and many give publishers and journals inviting you to submit your research false information about their headquarters locations, claiming manuscripts for publication or to serve on a new journal’s edi- to be based, for example, in London or New York, when they torial board. The emails typically promise a fast and easy pub- are really based in South Asia or West Africa. Often predatory lishing process and make claims about the “high quality” of the journals claim they have ‘impact factors’ when they really do journal, bragging about where it is indexed and about the high not, and there are now companies that supply fake impact fac- metrics it has earned. tors to such journals. Many such emails come from what I have termed ‘predatory Many predatory publishers use boastful language, claiming publishers’. Predatory publishers generally charge authors to that their journals are ‘leading journals’ in their fields, and many publish their research articles but make the content freely avail- claim to be indexed in Scopus when they are not indexed any- able on the internet. This model is called gold (author-pays) where except in Google Scholar, which aims to be comprehen- open access. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this sive and includes most journals, regardless of their quality. publishing model, the predatory publishers have exploited weak- Overall, predatory publishers are not transparent about where nesses in the model and seek only to earn as much money as they are based, who the owners are, and what other publishers possible from researchers. Their websites may appear similar to they are associated with. They use deception to trick authors those of high quality publishers, but they are counterfeit, and into submitting papers, and they do not follow the established most do not perform a standard peer review. They prefer to quick- standards and practices of the scholarly publishing industry. ly accept and publish as many papers as possible, so they can Unwary authors sometimes respond to a publisher’s spam earn money from scholarly authors. email by forwarding a manuscript. In some cases, the publish- Thus, by definition, predatory publishers and journals are ers immediately publish the paper, with no peer review and no those that exploit the gold open-access model for their own prof- revisions requested. Then the author is surprised by an invoice it. I understand that the term predatory does not translate well from the publisher, sometimes for over two thousand dollars. into all languages, and some prefer to use other terms, like van- At this point, the author becomes suspicious and emails the ity publisher, or parasitic publisher. Whatever name you prefer, publisher asking for the manuscript to be withdrawn. But the these publishers are a threat to science, a threat to academic eval- predatory publisher refuses to withdraw the paper unless a uation, and a threat to scholarly communication itself. ‘withdrawal fee’ is paid. The author has the choice of paying the Many predatory publishers pretend they are ‘associations’ or publishing fee or the withdrawal fee, and the author cannot ‘institutes’, and they publish journals whose titles are similar to submit the paper to another journal because it is already pub- the titles of established and respected journals. Often they in- lished. The predatory publisher holds the paper as a ‘hostage’ corporate terms such as International, or Global, or Universal until the ‘ransom’ is paid. © 2016 The Korean Academy of Medical Sciences. pISSN 1011-8934 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. eISSN 1598-6357 Beall J • Dangerous Predatory Publishers Threaten Medical Research I first started writing about predatory publishers in 2009 and power plants are more harmful than honest science has found. coined the term predatory publisher in 2010 (1). I publish a blog Others have written articles claiming a newly-discovered drug called Scholarly Open Access (http://scholarlyoa.com) that in- is efficacious, hoping to attract investors and even selling the cludes a list of predatory publishers, and the list now has over drug over the Internet without government approval. one thousand entries. A second list includes predatory or ques- Another problem predatory journals have made possible is tionable standalone journals. These are low-quality or predato- the publication of pseudo-science. One field of study that seems ry journals that exist alone on the Internet, with no named pub- to regularly attract pseudo-scientists is cosmology. There are lisher. Many of these are mega-journals and have broad scopes. open, unanswered questions in cosmology, including the ques- They want to accept as many papers as possible so they can tion of the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Some research- generate more revenue from authors. My blog also includes ers have used the easy publishing process that predatory pub- commentary on predatory journals, with two blog posts pub- lishers offer to ‘answer’ these questions. Others write to ‘correct’ lished each week. Einstein or Newton. Their articles tend to be written in such a way that it is difficult to prove or disprove them. Papers denying THE DAMAGE THAT PREDATORY PUBLISHERS climate change or the anthropogenic nature of climate change CAUSE are also commonly published in predatory journals. Academic evaluation has been negatively affected by preda- By far, predatory publishers damage science more than anything tory journals. For many decades, universities relied on the schol- else. They do not faithfully manage peer review, allowing ques- arly publishing industry to properly manage peer review and to tionable science to be published as if it had passed a strong peer enforce selectivity in science and other research. But now, get- review. We know that peer review often results in papers being ting an article published is easy — all one has to do is deliver a rejected for publication, but this rejection is contrary to the busi- manuscript and pay the fee. Unfortunately, many universities ness model of many open-access publishers, because they only have not updated their evaluation policies to account for the want to generate as much revenue as possible. existence of predatory journals. Too many of them look only at Peer review also helps authors find and eliminate errors be- the number of publications, ignoring the quality of the journal fore the final version of the scientific article is prepared and pub- where the research appears. lished. Peer review benefits authors and benefits science itself. This problem has led to some university faculty taking ad- We also know that research is cumulative, and new research vantage of the easy publishing process in low-quality journals. builds on the foundations established by earlier research. When They quickly publish several journal articles while honest col- writing scientific articles, many researchers first search the schol- leagues publish a smaller number of articles but in higher qual- arly literature to discover what earlier research has been pub- ity journals. However, the university only looks at the number lished on the particular scientific question they seek to answer. of articles each researcher has published, giving an unfair ad- Because of predatory journals and their negligent peer review vantage to those using predatory journals. management, now many unscientific articles have been pub- Not all researchers who publish in predatory journals are ex- lished. The scientific literature has become polluted, bringing ploiting the easy publishing, however. I call such journals pred- the cumulative nature of research into doubt. atory because they aim to trick honest researchers, and often When doing literature searches, researchers should take care they are successful at this. So sometimes we see good research in deciding which articles to cite and which to ignore. If a scien- published in bad journals, because an honest researcher has tific paper cites earlier articles published in predatory journals, been fooled by the predator. it may itself be considered questionable. Unfortunately, some Sometimes spam emails come at just the wrong time. Because scholarly databases have not been careful and have included top journals are selective, they frequently reject articles, even the content of predatory journals. One example is Google Schol- good ones. This can cause a sense of despair for the authors (2). ar.
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