Predatory Publishing
eBook - ePub

Predatory Publishing

Jingfeng Xia

Share book
  1. 148 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Predatory Publishing

Jingfeng Xia

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Predatory Publishing introduces and examines many forms of unethical and unprofessional publishing, whilst also analyzing its tactics and impact on scholarly communication.

Covering all aspects of predatory publishing, including topics such as predatory journals, hijacked publications, alternative metrics, and fraudulent conferences, the book considers the sociocultural, geopolitical, and technical impact of predatory behaviors. Demonstrating that predatory publishing has taken advantage of the open access movement, the author highlights the negative impact such publishing practices have had on science discovery and dissemination around the world. Efforts to counter unethical and destructive conduct, such as journal blacklists, peer-review sting operations, the implementation of the strict journal selection criteria by the Directory of Open Access Journals, and government regulations in some countries, are also fully described.

Predatory Publishing is a useful resource for every researcher, practitioner, and student in the global scholarly community. Individuals can expect to get a whole picture of the practice by reading this book, and decision-makers will find it informative to support their decisions. This book will be of interest to those studying and working in the fields of publishing, library and information science, communication science, economics, and higher education. People in other fields, particularly biomedical sciences, will also find it useful.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Predatory Publishing an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Predatory Publishing by Jingfeng Xia in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Publishing. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2021
ISBN
9781000553161

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003029335-1
This book seeks to illustrate the dynamics of predatory publishing and serve as a reference point to help readers become familiar with primary predatory practices. Predatory publishing is an exploitative business model in the scholarly publishing market that is devised solely for financial gain (Beall, 2013). It sets article processing charges (APCs) for authors, provides no or only peripheral peer reviews for submissions, and ignores editorial services for publications (Anderson, 2019). To maximize profit, predatory publishers often adopt deceptive tactics to entice submissions and compel payments. The definition of predatory publishing, devised by a group of researchers, publishers, policymakers, funders, and librarians from ten countries, is:
[publications] that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices.
(Grudniewicz et al., 2019)
Aside from this concise definition, detailed criteria to identify predatory publishing have been developed and frequently adjusted by scholars or organizations to capture diverse and constantly changing practices (Strinzel et al., 2019). The first comprehensive criteria were assembled by Jeffrey Beall in 2012, that include 48 signs of predatory practices which were amended in 2015 to increase to 54 signs, falling in four categories: editors and staff, integrity, business management, and other (Beall, 2012, 2015). Similar criteria have been made by others, e.g., Cobey et al. (2018), Cukier et al. (2020), and Eriksson and Helgesson (2017). All criteria aim to assess journals and publishers by measuring every aspect of their function, from the evaluation of their publication quality to the observation of their abnormal operations, but differ in individual measures (e.g., Olivarez et al., 2018).
Predatory publishing has become an epidemic practice over the past two decades. The earliest evidence was noted in the late 2000s, when publishers started sending spam emails to individual researchers to solicit submissions and invite them to serve as editors or on editorial boards (Beall, 2009; Eysenbach, 2008; Poynder, 2008). These publications were found to lack transparency, be exploitative, and not check content for quality and legitimacy (Beall, 2013). Beall applied his criteria to identify a list of possible predatory publishers, and published the list on his website scholarlyoa.org in the early 2010s. He subsequently added a list of standalone journals and some other lists. These lists immediately became popular as the go-to tools to help authors avoid predatory outlets, though controversy surrounding the accuracy of inclusions remained (Kendall, 2021; Teixeira da Silva, 2017).
Since then, predatory publishing has grown exponentially. Beall listed 18 predatory publishers in 2010, while the number climbed to 1,163 in early 2017, when he shut down his website. A study by Björk et al. (2020) found more than 10,000 predatory journals in 2018, which is a stark contrast to the fewer than 100 journals in the earliest journal blacklist (Beall, 2013). Similarly, the total number of articles in predatory journals increased from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 in 2014 (Shen & Björk, 2015). These volumes indicate the involvement of hundreds of thousands of scholars across the world in predatory publishing.
Predatory publishing is a heterogenous mixture of businesses, which is not only reflected in varied practices in editorial and publishing services, but also in multiple forms of publishing outcomes. Its most popular form is dishonourable scholarly journals by predatory publishers, but it also includes predatory conferences, hijacked journals, and artificial metrics and alternative indexes. Authors who get involved in predatory publishing include scholars who fall prey to spam invitations and those who are knowing participants for personal reasons (Perlin et al., 2018).
The literature of predatory publishing has been distributed across all scientific disciplines, particularly in health science (Mertkan et al., 2021). Studies are mostly discipline-specific and can hardly paint a big picture of the practice. Insofar as we can tell, there is no single manuscript which synthesizes the scattered studies and observations on the business, but researchers do need a comprehensive guide that is international in scope to assist those from both developing and developed countries who have been victimized by, or have intentionally participated in, predatory publishing. Hopefully, this book will also help the general public understand the complexity of academic misconduct, since the results of low-quality and fraudulent scientific studies can negatively impact practice, perceptions, and decision-making.
The harm of predatory practices to scholarship is tangible. Publishing in predatory outlets is a waste of effort, time, and money, since it will not add any scientific merits to the authors, as indicated by the negligible citation counts (Björk et al., 2020; Moher et al., 2017). At the same time, it can damage the reputation of individuals, institutions, and funding agencies. The best way to fight predatory publishing is to promote awareness among people – including those in the Global South, where access to scholarly information is not always available and those in the North, where pressure to publish has been enormous – by providing a single point of introduction that brings all the many issues together. This is what the book hopes to achieve.

About this book

This book introduces the primary forms of predatory publishing, focusing on both the tactics and the results. It views predatory publishing as a scholarly ecosystem of the open access (OA) movement, reviews it on a global scale, and pinpoints its negative impact on science discovery and dissemination. Efforts to fight unprofessional and destructive conducts are described, and suggestions for avoiding predatory publishing are provided.
After this introductory chapter and the next chapter examining possible causes behind predatory publishing, Chapter 3 focuses on the key characteristics of predatory journals, including an introduction of the history and conditions of journal blacklists and whitelists and a summary of the studies on predatory journals. This chapter strives to describe the impact of scientific misconduct on scholarly communication, and attempts to provide tips as to what can be done to minimize involvement in predatory publishing.
Chapter 4 discusses predatory publishers that have been exposed for delivering false information to attract business. An analysis of the changes of blacklisted publishers is made to illustrate the development of predatory behaviors. Legal cases against and by predatory publishers are highlighted to delineate challenges in the fight against dishonorable and fraudulent practices.
The next chapter reviews the authorship of predatory publications: who has collaborated with predatory journals? Are they willing participants or innocent victims? It examines author profiles for their geographic distributions, academic ranking, publication history, and citation count. This chapter also explores the editorship of predatory journals to find how the journals adopt unethical techniques to trick scholars or steal personal identities, and how some scholars collude with publishers to build their credentials. Other roles in predatory publishing, namely those who help review submissions and those who read and cite articles in predatory journals, are all discussed.
In Chapter 6, hijacked publishing is introduced as an emerging type of cybercrime that impersonates legitimate academic journals by abusing or copying legitimate journal names and using logos from genuine publications to gain credibility. The hijacked websites and their attempts to intercept money from authors are highlighted. Some typical cases and detection strategies are described here.
Chapter 7 introduces various aspects of predatory conferences, which are the primary form of revenue for many predatory publishers. Predatory conferences are particularly common in health sciences, e.g., pharmaceutical sciences, and thus may potentially create negative impacts on the medical field. Both research results and media reports are synthesized to help readers understand the threat of pseudoscience and nonsense to scientific exploration as well as to our everyday lives.
The last chapter discusses predatory services that provide artificial impact factor values to questionable OA journals. The artificial metrics are compared to the standard metrics that have been recognized by the scholarly community. A list of artificial metrics as well as journal indexes is analyzed against well-recognized ones, revealing unethical conduct that takes advantage of open access to make profit for predatory services.
Predatory publishing is a very diverse practice that touches almost every facet of scholarly communication. Studies of, and opinions on, the practice are enormous, in various formats, and cover multiple academic fields. The complexity makes it difficult for the author to cover everything about the practice in one book. Nor does he intend to itemize all discoveries and opinions of each publication about the subject. It is inevitable that he has brought his personal views into the descriptions.
There has been debate over the term “predatory,” which is considered unable to reflect the diverse practices of the field (e.g., Anderson, 2015). In many publications, predatory praxis is called “publishing crime,” while actions to catch predation are labelled “academic witch-hunts” (Molchanova et al., 2017; Umlauf & Mochizuki, 2018). In other cases, the term is urged to be retired and be replaced with “write-only,” “deceptive,” “bad faith,” “trash,” and the like. This book, however, keeps the existing vocabulary because “predatory publishing” has been an extensively accepted label to define the practice.

2 Background

DOI: 10.4324/9781003029335-2
Predatory publishing does not ...

Table of contents