How to avoid being duped by predatory journals
BMJ 2024; 384 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.q452 (Published 07 March 2024) Cite this as: BMJ 2024;384:q452- Eva Amsen
- London, UK
- eva.amsen{at}gmail.com
There are tens of thousands of academic journals, with new ones appearing all the time, creating a complicated landscape of many potential homes for every article. “Unfortunately, because it’s so big and confusing, predatory journals have taken advantage of this system,” says Dominic Mitchell, operations manager at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and current chair of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, a trade association of open access journal and book publishers.
“A predatory publication is one that is deceptive in some way; where the publishers are not transparent about what they’re doing,” explains Katherine Stephan, research support librarian at Liverpool John Moores University.
In 2019 a US court ordered OMICS Publishing Group to pay $50.1m to the Federal Trade Commission for misleading researchers.1 The court found that OMICS engaged in numerous deceptive practices. Often authors were not told about publishing fees until after their articles were accepted. Those who then asked for their articles to be withdrawn were frequently refused.
And this is just the tip of an iceberg of bad publishing practices. Keeping track of the deception is difficult—partly because there is no hard line between what’s considered predatory and what’s not. But publishing experts are trying to make sense of it and help researchers make informed choices.
A spectrum of bad practices
In 2019 an international panel of publishers, librarians, researchers, and others agreed a general definition of predatory publishing: “Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritise self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterised by false or misleading information, deviation from …
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