Journals that publish work without proper peer review and which charge scholars sometimes huge fees to submit should not be allowed to share space with legitimate journals and publishers, whether open access or not. These journals and publishers cheapen intellectual work by misleading scholars, preying particularly early career researchers trying to gain an edge. The credibility of scholars duped into publishing in these journals can be seriously damaged by doing so. It is important that as a scholarly community we help to protect each other from being taken advantage of in this way.

1. SOFTWARE TOOL TO
IDENTIFY PREDATORY
PUBLICATIONS DEVELOPED
BY SPPU
By
Dr. S Ghosh
NBU

2. Predatory Journals
WhatAre Predatory Journals And Why ShouldWe
Worry?

3. What is a predatory journal?
A PREDATORY JOURNAL IS A PUBLICATION
THAT ACTIVELY ASKS RESEARCHERS FOR
MANUSCRIPTS.
THEY HAVE NO PEER REVIEW SYSTEM AND
NO TRUE EDITORIAL BOARD AND ARE
OFTEN FOUND TO PUBLISH MEDIOCRE OR
EVEN WORTHLESS PAPERS.
THEY ALSO ASK FOR HUGE PUBLICATION
CHARGES.

4. Predatory Journal
Predatory journals is a phrase
(now in wider usage) coined
by Jeffrey Beall, scholarly
communications librarian at
the University of Colorado at
Denver, that refers to journals
(and journal publishers) whose
main purpose seems to be to
exploit ("prey on") scholars
and academics and their need
to publish the results of their
research.

5. Jeffrey Beall,
University of Colorado, Denver

6. Introduction
 In March 2008, Gunther Eysenbach, publisher
of an early open access journal, drew attention
to what he called,
 "black sheep among open access publishers
and journals”

7. Introduction
In July 2008, Richard Poynder's interview series brought
attention to the practices of new publishers who were
"better able to exploit the opportunities of the new
environment."
Doubts about honesty and scams in a subset of open-
access journals continued to be raised in 2009.
Concerns for spamming practices ushered the leading open
access publishers to create the
“Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association in 2008”.

8. Richard Poynder

9. Introduction
 In another early precedent, in
2009 the Improbable Research
blog had found that Scientific
Research Publishing's journals
duplicated papers already
published elsewhere; the case
was subsequently reported in
Nature.

10. Introduction
In 2010, Cornell University
graduate student Phil Davis
(editor of the Scholarly
Kitchen blog) submitted a
manuscript consisting of
computer-generated nonsense
(using SCIgen) which was
accepted for a fee (but
withdrawn by the author).

11. CRAP Paper Accepted By Journal
Phil Davis is consultant
specializing in analysis of
citation, readership, and survey
data. He has
a publishing
the statistical
publication
a Ph.D. in science
communication from Cornell University
(2010), extensive experience as a science
librarian (1995-2006) and was trained as a
life scientist.

12. Introduction
 Predatory publishers have been reported to hold submissions hostage,
refusing to allow them to be withdrawn and thereby preventing submission
in another journal.

13. Bohannon's
experiment
About 60% of those journals, including the Journal of Natural
Pharmaceuticals, accepted the faked medical paper, and 40%,
including the most established one, PLOS ONE, rejected it.
In 2013, John Bohannon, a staff writer for the journal Science and for
popular science publications, targeted the open access system by
submitting to a number of such journals a deeply flawed paper and
published the results in a paper called, "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?".
"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?"

14. Bohannon's experiment "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?"

15. 'Dr Fraud' experiment
• In 2015, four researchers created a fictitious sub-
par scientist named Anna O. Szust (oszust is
Polish for "fraud" [person]), and applied on her
behalf for an editor position to 360 scholarly
journals.
• Szust's qualifications were dismal for the role of
an editor; she had never published a single article
and had no editorial experience.
• The books and book chapters listed on her CV
were made-up, as were the publishing houses
that published the books.

16. 'Dr Fraud' experiment

17. 'Dr Fraud’ experiment
 One-third of the journals to which
Szust applied were sampled from
Beall's List of 'predatory' journals.
 Forty of these predatory journals
accepted Szust as editor without
any background vetting and often
within days or even hours.
 By comparison, she received
minimal to no positive response
from the "control" journals which
"must meet certain standards of
quality, including ethical
publishing practices."

18. Anna O. Szust (oszust is Polish for "fraud" [person]

19. 'Dr Fraud'
experiment
 Among journals sampled from the
Directory of Open Access Journals
(DOAJ), 8 of 120 accepted Szust.
 The DOAJ has since removed some
(but not all) of the affected
journals in a recent purge. None of
the 120 sampled journals listed in
Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
offered Szust the position.
 The results of the experiment
were published in Nature in
March 2017, and widely presented
in the press.

20. 'Dr Fraud' experiment

21. SCIgen experiments
 SCIgen, a computer program that
randomly generates academic
computer science papers using
context-free grammar, has
generated papers that have been
accepted by a number of predatory
journals as well as predatory
conferences.

22. How three MIT students fooled the world of
scientific journals

23. Why do academics
publish in such
journals?
In research environments, there is usually
more value for quantity over quality.
Hiring and promotion of academics is based
largely on their number of publications.
Predatory journals has helped many pseudo-
researchers to prosper.

24. What is the harm caused by predatory journals?
• Predatory and low-quality journals corrupt the
literature.
• Medical science has been particularly hit hard,
with journals now devoted to unscientific
medicine.
• “Peer review is at the heart of academic
evaluation.
• Publishing without peer review [while
pretending that peer review was done] gives
poor and mediocre academics a chance for jobs
and promotions which should go to better
qualified researchers,”

25. How does one find out if a given
journal is predatory or not?
• some people think any journal from an
unknown publisher, or a journal that
charges for publication, is necessarily
predatory.
• That is not necessarily correct. The important
thing is to dig deeper and find the quality of
submitted manuscripts and its standards,”

26. How does one find out if a given journal is
predatory or not?

27. Beall’s criteria for identification
of predatory journals
• Here is a curated list Beall’s criteria for
identification of predatory journals and
publishers
• No single individual is identified as specific
journal’s editor with no formal editorial/review
board or the same editorial board for more
than one journal.
• The editor and/or review board members do
not have academic expertise in the journal’s
field.

28. Beall’s criteria for identification of
predatory journals

29. Checklist to Identify Fake Journal
• Do you or your colleagues know the journal?
• Can you easily identify and contact the publisher?
• Is the journal clear about the type of peer review
it uses?
• Are articles indexed in services that you use?
• Is it clear what fees will be charged?
• Do you recognise the editorial board?
• Is the publisher a member of a recognised
industry initiative (COPE,DOAJ,OASPA)?

30. Checklist to Identify Fake Journal
• The publisher has poorly maintained websites,
including dead links, prominent misspellings and
grammatical errors on the website.
• The publisher makes unauthorised use of
licensed images on their website, taken from
the open web, without permission or licensing
from the copyright owners.
• Re-publish papers already published in other
venues/outlets without providing appropriate
credits.

31. Checklist to Identify Fake Journal

32. Checklist to Identify Fake Journal
• Use boastful language claiming to be a ‘leading publisher’ even
though the publisher may only be a start-up or a novice
organisation.
• Provide minimal or no copyediting or proofreading of
submissions.
• Publish papers that are not academic at all, e.g. essays by lay
people, polemical editorials, or pseudo-science.
• Have a ‘contact us’ page that only includes a web form or an
email address, and the publisher hides or does not reveal its
location.
• The publisher publishes journals that are excessively broad (e.g.
Journal of Education) or combine two or more fields not
normally treated together (e.g. International Journal of Business,
Humanities and Technology) in order to attract more articles and
gain more revenue from author fees.

33. Checklist to Identify Fake Journal

34. Characteristics of Predatory Journals
• Accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality
control, including hoax and nonsensical papers.
• Notifying academics of article fees only after papers are
accepted.
• Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or
serve on editorial boards.
• Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their
permission, and not allowing academics to resign from editorial
boards.
• Appointing fake academics to editorial boards.
• Mimicking the name or web site style of more established
journals.
• Making misleading claims about the publishing operation, such
as a false location.
• Using ISSNs improperly.
• Citing fake or non-existent impact factors.

36. Predatory Open Access Publishing
open-access publishing is an
open-access
• Predatory
exploitative
publishing business model that
academic
involves
charging publication fees to authors without
providing the editorial and publishing
services associated with legitimate journals
(open access or not).

38. Predatory open access publishing
• The idea that they are "predatory" is based
on the view that academics are tricked into
publishing with them, though some authors
may be aware that the journal is poor
quality or even fraudulent.
• New scholars from developing countries are
said to be especially at risk of being misled by
predatory practices.

39. HRD ministry to remove all bogus journals
• For the study titled “A critical analysis of the
‘UGC-approved list of journals’, a team of six
researchers, in association with the human
resource development (HRD) ministry, analysed
1,336 academic periodicals randomly selected
from a list of 5,699 journals in the so-called
university-source component.
• Their conclusion: “Over 88% of non-indexed
journals in the university source component of
UGC-approved list could be of low quality.”

40. HRD ministry to remove all bogus
journals

41. HRD ministry to remove all bogus
journals
• The dubious publications were identified by
the team of researchers that included
Bhushan Patwardhan, a professor at the
Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), a
special invitee member on the UGC Standing
Committee for Notification of Journals and
former vice-chancellor of Symbiosis
International University

42. Prof. Bhushan Patwardhan, Savitribai Phule
Pune University (SPPU)

43. HRD ministry to remove all bogus journals
• Out of the 1,336 journals studied, 897 were
disqualified from the UGC- approved list of journals
by the human resource development ministry for
providing false information such as an incorrect
ISSN (International Standard Serial Number), making
false claims about the impact getting published in their
pages would have, indexing in dubious databases,
poor credentials of editors and non-availability of
information such as an address, website details and
names of editors. Papers published in the
disqualified journals will not be considered valid.

44. HRD ministry to remove all bogus journals

45. Beall's List Of Predatory Publishers
• Potential predatory scholarly open-access publishers
• https://beallslist.weebly.com/
• Cabell’s New Predatory Journal Blacklist
• https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/07/25/cab
ells-new-predatory-journal-blacklist-review/
• List of Predatory Journals
• https://predatoryjournals.com/journals/

46. UGC-CARE
Consortium for
Academic and
Research Ethics

47. References
• Predatory open access publishing
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open_access_publishing
• Predatory Journals: What are they?
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4845443/
• Predatory Journals putting a question mark on quality research in India
• https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/breaking-shackles/predatory-journals-
putting-a-question-mark-on-quality-research-in-india/
• Rise in 'predatory publishers' has sparked a warning for scientists and
researchers
• http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-13/rise-in-predatory-publishers-sparks-
warning-for-researchers/9640950
• Thirteen ways to spot a ‘predatory journal’ (and why we shouldn’t call
them that)
• https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/thirteen-ways-to-spot-a-
predatory-journal-and-why-we-shouldnt-call-them-that

48. The End…