Predatory journals enter biomedical databases through public funding

In the past decade the scientific community has faced a serious threat to its integrity and credibility with the rise of predatory journals. These journals manipulate and exploit the open access publishing model but omit the quality checks and editorial services that are routinely provided by legitimate journals, such as peer review, plagiarism detection, and verification of ethical approval of experiments. Although the descriptor “predatory” has been criticised for grossly conflating poor quality with misconduct and for simplistically classifying the scholarly publishing environment into bad and good (predatory or not),1 the term is now widely accepted to describe the phenomenon.

In conjunction with the online spread of predatory journals, we have recently shown that a worryingly high number of predatory journal articles are indexed in PubMed,2 the free-to-access biomedical database maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). PubMed contains over 30 million searchable abstracts and citations that are drawn from three NLM literature sources: Medline, a database of citations from selected journals; Bookshelf, a repository for books, reports, databases, and other documents; and PubMed Central (PMC), a digital repository for full text articles. PMC is particularly vulnerable to infiltration by predatory journal articles because individual authors upload their articles into the database in accordance with funder requirements, even though the journals might not meet the standard for indexing in PubMed.3 By doing so, individual articles are displayed in both PMC and PubMed, which is concerning because it potentially legitimises research that has not been appropriately reviewed, and represents a substantial waste of public money being used to pay for publication.