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Where Should I Publish My Research? : Avoid "Predatory" Publications
Avoiding Predatory Publications
In general, we advise a “checklist” approach to analyzing whether a journal is engaged in unethical practices, rather than a “list” approach, particularly if we aren’t sure who runs the list, how they add to the list, and how publishers can apply to remove their names from the list. Although this takes more time, it can allow you to investigate and probe more deeply into the question.
Some useful tools we often recommend can be found below:
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Think.Check.Submit.The checklist is a tool that will help you discover what you need to know when assessing whether or not a publisher is suitable for your research.
A summary of some quality journal criteria and indicators of possible deception follow below. These are not necessarily comprehensive, but they are a starting place.
Quality journal criteria include:
- Scope is well-defined and clearly stated
- Owner & management is clearly stated
- Editor, editorial board are recognized experts in the field
- Journal is affiliated with or sponsored by an established scholarly society or academic institution
- Articles are within the scope of the journal and meet the standards of the discipline
- Any fees or charges for publishing in the journal are easily found on the journal web site and clearly explained
- Articles have DOIs (Digital Object Identifier, e.g., doi:10.1111/j.1742-9544.2011.00054.x)
- Use and re-use of content is clearly stated on articles
- Journal has an ISSN
- Publisher is a member of Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
- Journal is registered in UlrichsWeb, Cabells
- Journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals
- Journal is included in subject databases and/or indexes
Indicators of possible deception include:
- Spams mailing lists for editors and/or contributors
- Website lacks clear information about APCs or manuscript handling process
- Rapid editorial/review time
- Scope is too broad
- Copy names/websites of legitimate journals
- Discovery: Journal is not indexed where it is relevant for its field
- Editors/reviewers are unknown
- No clear strategy for handling misconduct (e.g. retraction policy)
- No clear digital preservation/archiving
- Poorly or inconsistently formatted pages, text, tables & figures
- Grammatical & copyediting errors
- Brief/insufficient/incomplete bibliography with a wide range of styles
- Wide range of article lengths
- Statistical/methodological errors
List adapted from "Open Access Journal Quality Indicators" by Grand Valley State University Libraries, which is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
Additional News and Tools
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The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidlyScience is characterized by collaboration and cooperation, but also by uncertainty, competition, and inequality. While there has always been some concern that these pressures may compel some to defect from the scientific research ethos—i.e., fail to make genuine contributions to the production of knowledge or to the training of an expert workforce—the focus has largely been on the actions of lone individuals. Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased. Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities—paper mills (i.e., sellers of mass-produced low quality and fabricated research), brokers (i.e., conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research), predatory journals, who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions—that facilitate systematic scientific fraud. Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud. Our results reveal some of the strategies that enable the entities promoting scientific fraud to evade interventions. Our final analysis suggests that this ability to evade interventions is enabling the number of fraudulent publications to grow at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science.
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Masquerade of authority: hijacked journals are gaining more credibility than original onesAt the moment, the academic world is faced with various challenges that negatively impact science integrity. One is hijacked journals, a second, inauthentic website for indexed legitimate journals, managed by cybercriminals. These journals publish any manuscript by charging authors and pose a risk to scientific integrity. This piece compares a journal’s original and hijacked versions regarding authority in search engines. A list of 16 medical journals, along with their hijacked versions, has been collected. The MOZ Domain Authority has been used to check the authority of both original and hijacked journals, and the results have been discussed. It indicates that hijacked journals are gaining more credibility than original ones. This should alarm academia and highlights a need for serious action against hijacked journals. The related policies should be planned, and tools should be developed to support easy detection of hijacked journals. On the publishers’ side, the visibility of journals’ websites must be enhanced to address this issue.
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Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal CheckerHijacked journals mimic legitimate journals by adopting their titles, ISSNs, and other metadata. Usually, hijacked journals mirror legitimate journals without permission from the original journal; at rare times, however, publishers will buy rights to a legitimate journal but continue the publication under considerably less stringent publishing protocols and without clearly noting to the reader the change in ownership or publication standards (sometimes known as “cloned” journals). Scholars can be duped into publishing in hijacked journals – many of which require fees – by offers of fast publication and indexing in databases such as Scopus; being indexed in such databases is viewed by many universities and governments as a mark of legitimacy.
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Where to Publish Presentation SlidesPresentation slides by Harvard Librarians Rebecca Martin and Colin Lukens
Attribution
Content in this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and is adapted from "Identifying Appropriate Journals for Publication" by University of Alberta Health Sciences Library which is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
