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The term predatory publishers was presented to the academic world for the first time by Jeffrey Beall in 2010 [1]. His first list reported 20 predatory publishers. As the number of predatory publishers was increasing, he introduced also predatory standalone journals in 2012 and created two separate lists which contain names of predatory publishers and standalone journals. According to Beall’s idea, predatory publishers are to be considered bad for science and bad for science communication, because they are a repository for bogus researches which may be cited by other authors.
Furthermore, the papers published in these journals may contain types of plagiarism. We can consider these journals only as a pay and publish model. Publishers with unknown headquarters location, publishers which send spam emails calling for papers and publishers with many new titles are clear examples of predatory journals.
Clark and colleagues believe that predatory journals are not indexed in reputable library systems and they lose science. They state that for confronting these journals, authors and reputable journals must collaborate all together [2]. Moher and colleagues discussed about the call for papers [3]. According to their observation, these emails have mostly been sent by predatory journals. Lukic and colleagues give valuable information on the rising trend of predatory journals and warn about the possible spreading of these journals to higher income countries [4].
There is further evidence of valuable research about predatory publishers in academic resources. We believe that predatory publishers are a serious and real problem for science but they are not the sole problem. There are other questionable journals in the academic world that we can consider as misleading journals, and fake publishers are the clear sample of them. Hijacked journals are journals which abuse the name and ISSNs of reputable journals and were detected for the first time by Mehrdad Jalalian in early 2012 [5]. The number of aforementioned journals has risen from three titles in 2011 to 90 titles in 2015; this suggests us to state that these journals are a problem for science publishing. If compared to predatory journals, the so called “hijacked” journals have more chance of receiving papers from authors because they introduce themselves as reputable journals with indexing such as Thomson Reuters. If we would like to estimate the growing rate of “hijacked” journals from 2011 to 2015, we could conclude that the rate is 9000%. By using this methodology, we can calculate even the growing rate of predatory publishers. The number of predatory publishers has risen from 18 in 2011 to 700 in 2015. Thus, their growing rate is 3888%. This evidence suggest that more investigations are needed into this challenge to the academic world.
We can consider fake publishers as another problem for academic publishing. Fake publishers are publishers which have not been registered legally by any institute [6]. We can consider them as the websites for archiving papers with fake journal names. They use unregistered ISSNs for their fake journals. We can classify these journals as a sub category of predatory journals. The aforementioned three types of questionable journals have basic similarities:
All of them suggest fast review process for publishing in high impact factor or indexed journals by sending spam emails.
All of them work based on open access publishing system, they receive money for publishing papers but really they are based on a pay and publish model.
Often, victims of these journals are from low income countries. The main reason may be the poor research and scientific level of authors.
The best way of confronting these growing problems is to set an educational plan to create the basis to let the researchers be informed about these questionable journals. At the end of the day these questionable journals are very similar to phishing websites. A phishing website is a fake website for an authentic one which has been created by forgers for cheating users [7]. Questionable journals are based on fake websites similar to phishing attacks and we may use currently developed methods for the detection of phishing websites and questionable journals. Today, Phish Tank [8] is a popular and updated base for phishing websites detection and expert people all over world enter new phishing websites' information in it. Many big information security companies use phishing URLs to detect malicious websites by using a black list approach. A similar approach can be developed to detect debatable journals and this strategy might be utilized by researchers all over the world.
Mehdi Dadkhah, Department of Computer and Information Technology, Foulad Institute of Technology, Foulad Shahr, Isfahan 8491663763, Iran
Technical Committee of International Arab Journal of Information Technology
Email: dadkhah80@gmail.com, m.dadkhah@iautiran.ac.ir
References
1. Beall J, "Medical Publishing Triage – Chronicling Predatory Open Access Publishers", Annals of Medicine and Surgery 2013; 2(2): 47–49.
2. Clark J, Smith R, "Firm action needed on predatory journals", BMJ 2015; 350: h210 doi: 10.1136/bmj.h210
3. Moher D, Srivastava A, "You Are Invited to Submit…", BMC Medicine 2015; 13(8): 1-4 doi: 10.1186/s12916-015-0423-3
4. Lukić T, Blešić I, Basarin B, Ivanović Bibić L, Milošević, D, Sakulski D, “Predatory and fake scientific journals/publishers – a global outbreak with rising trend: a review”, Geographica Pannonica 2014; 18(3): pp.69–81.
5. Jalalian M, Dadkhah M, "The full story of 90 hijacked journals from August 2011 to June 2015", Geographica Pannonica 2015; 19(2): 73-87.
6. Jalalian M, "Solutions for commandeered journals, debatable journals, and forged journals", Contemporary Clinical Dentistry, 2015; 6(3): 283-285 doi: 10.4103/0976-237X.161852
7. Abbasi A, Zhang Z, Chen H, "A Statistical Learning Based System for Fake Website Detection", In Proceedings of the Workshop on Secure Knowledge Management, Dallas, Texas, November 3-4 2008
Predatory Journals/Publishers are not Sole Questionable Matter in Open Access Scholarly Publishing, They Are Part of Problem
The term predatory publishers was presented to the academic world for the first time by Jeffrey Beall in 2010 [1]. His first list reported 20 predatory publishers. As the number of predatory publishers was increasing, he introduced also predatory standalone journals in 2012 and created two separate lists which contain names of predatory publishers and standalone journals. According to Beall’s idea, predatory publishers are to be considered bad for science and bad for science communication, because they are a repository for bogus researches which may be cited by other authors.
Furthermore, the papers published in these journals may contain types of plagiarism. We can consider these journals only as a pay and publish model. Publishers with unknown headquarters location, publishers which send spam emails calling for papers and publishers with many new titles are clear examples of predatory journals.
Clark and colleagues believe that predatory journals are not indexed in reputable library systems and they lose science. They state that for confronting these journals, authors and reputable journals must collaborate all together [2]. Moher and colleagues discussed about the call for papers [3]. According to their observation, these emails have mostly been sent by predatory journals. Lukic and colleagues give valuable information on the rising trend of predatory journals and warn about the possible spreading of these journals to higher income countries [4].
There is further evidence of valuable research about predatory publishers in academic resources. We believe that predatory publishers are a serious and real problem for science but they are not the sole problem. There are other questionable journals in the academic world that we can consider as misleading journals, and fake publishers are the clear sample of them. Hijacked journals are journals which abuse the name and ISSNs of reputable journals and were detected for the first time by Mehrdad Jalalian in early 2012 [5]. The number of aforementioned journals has risen from three titles in 2011 to 90 titles in 2015; this suggests us to state that these journals are a problem for science publishing. If compared to predatory journals, the so called “hijacked” journals have more chance of receiving papers from authors because they introduce themselves as reputable journals with indexing such as Thomson Reuters. If we would like to estimate the growing rate of “hijacked” journals from 2011 to 2015, we could conclude that the rate is 9000%. By using this methodology, we can calculate even the growing rate of predatory publishers. The number of predatory publishers has risen from 18 in 2011 to 700 in 2015. Thus, their growing rate is 3888%. This evidence suggest that more investigations are needed into this challenge to the academic world.
We can consider fake publishers as another problem for academic publishing. Fake publishers are publishers which have not been registered legally by any institute [6]. We can consider them as the websites for archiving papers with fake journal names. They use unregistered ISSNs for their fake journals. We can classify these journals as a sub category of predatory journals. The aforementioned three types of questionable journals have basic similarities:
All of them suggest fast review process for publishing in high impact factor or indexed journals by sending spam emails.
All of them work based on open access publishing system, they receive money for publishing papers but really they are based on a pay and publish model.
Often, victims of these journals are from low income countries. The main reason may be the poor research and scientific level of authors.
The best way of confronting these growing problems is to set an educational plan to create the basis to let the researchers be informed about these questionable journals. At the end of the day these questionable journals are very similar to phishing websites. A phishing website is a fake website for an authentic one which has been created by forgers for cheating users [7]. Questionable journals are based on fake websites similar to phishing attacks and we may use currently developed methods for the detection of phishing websites and questionable journals. Today, Phish Tank [8] is a popular and updated base for phishing websites detection and expert people all over world enter new phishing websites' information in it. Many big information security companies use phishing URLs to detect malicious websites by using a black list approach. A similar approach can be developed to detect debatable journals and this strategy might be utilized by researchers all over the world.
Mehdi Dadkhah, Department of Computer and Information Technology, Foulad Institute of Technology, Foulad Shahr, Isfahan 8491663763, Iran
Technical Committee of International Arab Journal of Information Technology
Email: dadkhah80@gmail.com, m.dadkhah@iautiran.ac.ir
References
1. Beall J, "Medical Publishing Triage – Chronicling Predatory Open Access Publishers", Annals of Medicine and Surgery 2013; 2(2): 47–49.
2. Clark J, Smith R, "Firm action needed on predatory journals", BMJ 2015; 350: h210 doi: 10.1136/bmj.h210
3. Moher D, Srivastava A, "You Are Invited to Submit…", BMC Medicine 2015; 13(8): 1-4 doi: 10.1186/s12916-015-0423-3
4. Lukić T, Blešić I, Basarin B, Ivanović Bibić L, Milošević, D, Sakulski D, “Predatory and fake scientific journals/publishers – a global outbreak with rising trend: a review”, Geographica Pannonica 2014; 18(3): pp.69–81.
5. Jalalian M, Dadkhah M, "The full story of 90 hijacked journals from August 2011 to June 2015", Geographica Pannonica 2015; 19(2): 73-87.
6. Jalalian M, "Solutions for commandeered journals, debatable journals, and forged journals", Contemporary Clinical Dentistry, 2015; 6(3): 283-285 doi: 10.4103/0976-237X.161852
7. Abbasi A, Zhang Z, Chen H, "A Statistical Learning Based System for Fake Website Detection", In Proceedings of the Workshop on Secure Knowledge Management, Dallas, Texas, November 3-4 2008
8. Phish Tank [Online Document], available at: https://www.phishtank.com [Accessed Aug 2015]
Conflict of interest
No conflicts of interest have been declared by the author.
Author's contribution
Single author manuscript
Funding
No funding source declared by author.
Competing interests: No competing interests