Shen and Björk BMC Medicine (2015) 13:230 DOI 10.1186/s12916-015-0469-2 RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access ‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics Cenyu Shen* and Bo-Christer Björk Abstract Background: A negative consequence of the rapid growth of scholarly open access publishing funded by article processing charges is the emergence of publishers and journals with highly questionable marketing and peer review practices. These so-called predatory publishers are causing unfounded negative publicity for open access publishing in general. Reports about this branch of e-business have so far mainly concentrated on exposing lacking peer review and scandals involving publishers and journals. There is a lack of comprehensive studies about several aspects of this phenomenon, including extent and regional distribution. Methods: After an initial scan of all predatory publishers and journals included in the so-called Beall’s list, a sample of 613 journals was constructed using a stratified sampling method from the total of over 11,000 journals identified. Information about the subject field, country of publisher, article processing charge and article volumes published between 2010 and 2014 were manually collected from the journal websites. For a subset of journals, individual articles were sampled in order to study the country affiliation of authors and the publication delays. Results: Over the studied period, predatory journals have rapidly increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 active journals. Early on, publishers with more than 100 journals dominated the market, but since 2012 publishers in the 10–99 journal size category have captured the largest market share. The regional distribution of both the publisher’s country and authorship is highly skewed, in particular Asia and Africa contributed three quarters of authors. Authors paid an average article processing charge of 178 USD per article for articles typically published within 2 to 3 months of submission. Conclusions: Despite a total number of journals and publishing volumes comparable to respectable (indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals) open access journals, the problem of predatory open access seems highly contained to just a few countries, where the academic evaluation practices strongly favor international publication, but without further quality checks. Keywords: Open access, Scientific publishing Background A side-effect of this transformation was the prospect it Introduction offered for a more radical rethinking of revenue models. The publishing of scholarly journals has, like so many New innovative publishers repositioned themselves as other areas in business and society, undergone a radical service providers to the authors, publishing with them, transformation due to the emergence of the Internet. rather than seeing themselves as content providers to Mainstream publishers of subscription journals started readers. In this model, authors pay the publishers for publishing parallel electronic versions of their journals their services, including that the articles become freely around the millennium shift [1] and today electronic de- accessible to anybody with Internet access (open access, livery of big bundles of journals via e-licensing is the OA). Other than that, the peer review practices, layout, dominating business model. indexing, and so on, remain largely the same. A major difference is nevertheless that the journals are published only in electronic format and that the delay from * Correspondence: [email protected] Information Systems Science, Hanken School of Economics, PO Box 479Arkadiankatu 22, Helsinki 00101, Finland © 2015 Shen and Björk. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Shen and Björk BMC Medicine (2015) 13:230 Page 2 of 15 submission to publishing is usually shorter compared to more difficult for serious OA journals to attract good traditional scholarly journals. manuscripts and get accepted to indexes such as Web of Open access scholarly publishing also includes OA Science. journals without publishing fees and subscription journals, Since most of the reporting in the media about preda- which also make their electronic version freely available tory OA has been concerned with individual cases and directly or after a delay [2]. In addition, the vast majority there have been very few scientific studies of the topic, of subscription journals from leading publishers nowadays the overall aim of this study was to: estimate the overall make individual articles available after payment, so-called size of predatory publishing; examine how it has grown hybrid OA [3]. Direct OA publishing is often called ‘gold’ in the last few years; and measure key characteristics of OA. In addition, there is a ‘green’ route in which authors this market. or third parties can legally make manuscript versions of articles published in traditional journals freely available on Earlier research the Internet [4]. This can be done on the authors’ own Reports of substandard or even nonsensical papers having webpages, or preferably in institutional or subject-based been published in peer-reviewed journals have gained a lot repositories. of publicity through coverage in the popular press. In The number of OA journals charging authors (using 2009, Phil Davis reported that he and a colleague had article processing charges, APCs) and the number of ar- submitted a grammatically correct but nonsensical manu- ticles published by them has rapidly risen in the last dec- script generated by a software program to Bentham’s Open ade, and some journals have reached a high scientific Information Science Journal, and that he had subsequently status in their field. Publishers have also started experi- received a mail stating that the article had been accepted menting with novel forms of peer review, in particular in for publishing, provided he would first pay the publication so-called ‘megajournals’, which only check for scientific charge of 800 USD [11]. An experiment designed by the rigor and validity, not for the significance of the results, journalist John Bohannon, in which a spoof manuscript which is left to the readers to decide [5]. The spectacular containing major methodological errors and other weak- success of the leading megajournal, PLOS ONE, which nesses was accepted by 157 journals and rejected only by publishes around 30,000 articles per year, shows that au- 98, also caught the attention of the general media [12]. thors appreciate this model. The problem with these types of studies is that they tell This study is, however, concerned with a peculiar sub- little about the scientific quality of the average papers in class of OA journals using APCs, made possible by the these journals. They do demonstrate that the peer review global reach and cost-effectiveness of the Internet. Pub- practices are often so deficient that just about any sort of lishers of this type of journal seem to be in the scholarly paper could be accepted for publishing without revisions publishing business only in order to collect APCs and in many of these journals. provide rapid publishing without proper peer review for A few case studies of predatory journals have been authors who need publications in their CVs. The informa- reported. Djuric describes in detail the publishing pres- tion on the Internet about the journals is often strongly sures in Serbia, where the government requires publishing misleading, and the publishers spam academics all over in journals having an ISI impact factor for academic ap- the globe with requests for submissions and reviews and pointments and even to obtain a PhD [13]. This has led to for joining editorial boards. a niche market for some local publishers, which have Jeffrey Beall coined the phrase ‘predatory publishers’ managed to get their journals into Web of Science, in the to describe publishers of this sort of journal [6]. Another wake of Thomson Reuter’s drive to index more regional term that has been suggested is pseudo-journals [7]. Beall journals during the latter half of the previous decade. has also defined a long list of criteria for identifying such Djuric sent a purposefully flawed manuscript to one such journals and produces a continuously updated index of journal, in which several of his university colleagues had publishers as well as individual journals fulfilling such published recently, and got an acceptance the next day criteria [8]. with instruction on how to pay the APC. Predatory publishers have caused a lot of negative Lukić et al. discuss a number of cases of ‘hijacked’ publicity for OA journals using APCs, partly due to the journals. In such cases, the activities are directly fraudu- spam email that they constantly send out to researchers lent [14]. The hijackers create websites with the same and partly due to a number of scandals involving names as respectable journals and then solicit