Publishing in an Environment of Predation: The Many Things You Really Wanted to Know, but Did Not Know How to Ask

Abstract

Predatory publishing is the charging of a fee for the publication of research material without providing the publication services an author would expect, such as peer review and editing. There is evidence that this practice has grown in recent years (Shen and Bjork, 2015). The purpose of this article, then, is to define and review the extent of predatory publishing practices in academic journals in recent years, and to ascertain what, if any, substantive damage can result from these practices. Following a review of the literature and using case study methodology, it was found that damages in the case of one large publisher were estimated to be over $50m, as per a court adjudication in the US. With open access publishing becoming more popular as a result of institutional, funder and national mandates, it is likely more authors could be tempted into making poor decisions and publishing their research articles in illegitimate journals, wasting funding resources and damaging their research reputations. This, and other implications are considered, as well as further research and actions that could mitigate the problems outlined in the article.

Keywords: predatory publishing, scholarly communications, academic research, publication ethics