Avoid Predatory Publishing

Most open access (OA) journals abide by some set of rigorous criteria, such as the membership criteria set forth by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). However, there are other OA journals that do not publish reputable work and are considered "predatory," meaning they only exist to exploit researchers and collect author fees.*

Predatory journals can often be difficult to distinguish from reputable OA journals, and some bogus publishers have been getting increasingly sophisticated. There are some red flags to look out for, however.

*Note that an author fee alone is not an indication that a journal is predatory. Because OA journals are not typically funded by the standard publishing model of subscription sales and/or advertisements, they are often reliant upon author fees (after peer review and/or acceptance) to cover publication costs. This has become a widely accepted publishing model in the past decade or so.

• Author or editorial board member solicitation via email (sometimes spam, sometimes personalized)
• Expedited "peer review" process/rapid publication promised
• Bogus impact factor
• Author fee expected before peer review or acceptance
• Odd capitalization and punctuation; misspellings and poor grammar; and generally unprofessional web/email design
• Images are distorted and/or fuzzy
• Title that is suspiciously similar to well-known journal's title (i.e. Journal of Communication in Healthcare [legitimate] vs. Journal of Healthcare Communications [predatory])
• Manuscript submission is via email
• No retraction policy
• No mention of copyright/author retaining copyright despite being open access
• Communication with publisher is only available via web contact form and/or personal email account(s)

Adapted from Shamseer L, et al. Potential predatory and legitimate biomedical journals: can you tell the difference? A cross-sectional comparison. BMC Med. 2017 Mar 16;15(1):28. doi: 10.1186/s12916-017-0785-9. PMID: 28298236; PMCID: PMC5353955. Table 10.

The website Think Check Submit is an excellent resource for determining whether or not you should publish in a journal or participate in a conference.

Sometimes, even after looking for red flags, it's still difficult to tell whether a journal is legitimate or not. For instance, new journals (especially from developing countries) can be mistakenly labeled as predatory.

Grand Valley State University Libraries has an excellent list of criteria by which you can determine whether or not a journal is legitimate: Open Access Journal Quality Indicators

If you are having difficulty determining a journal's legitimacy, simply let us know. We have a few additional tricks up our sleeve that can help vet a source and determine reliability, and we're happy to help.

While it can be challenging to distinguish legitimate from questionable, there are lists of quality journals and publishers available, particularly for the open access sector.

• AVSL Vetted List of Vision Science Journals - This is an ever-growing list of journals that have been verified for quality by the Association of Vision Science Librarians using a strict set of criteria.
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• Publons
• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)

• Predatory publishers’ latest scam: bootlegged and rebranded papers (Nature, October 26, 2021)
• Federal prosecutors join fight against predatory journals (Chronicle of Higher Education, August 2016)
• Predatory journals recruit fake editor (Nature, March 2017)
• A peek inside the strange world of fake academia (The New York Times, December 2016)