© 2016 The Korean Academy of Medical Sciences.
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pISSN 1011-8934
eISSN 1598-6357
Dangerous Predatory Publishers reaten Medical Research
This article introduces predatory publishers in the context of biomedical sciences research.
It describes the characteristics of predatory publishers, including spamming and using fake
metrics, and it describes the problems they cause for science and universities. Predatory
journals often fail to properly manage peer review, allowing pseudo-science to be
published dressed up as authentic science. Academic evaluation is also affected, as some
researchers take advantage of the quick, easy, and cheap publishing predatory journals
provide. By understanding how predatory publishers operate, researchers can avoid
becoming victimized by them.
Keywords: Predatory Publishing; Publication Ethics; Science Communication; Periodicals
as Topic; Editorial Policies
Jeffrey Beall
Auraria Library, University of Colorado, Denver, CO,
USA
Received: 14 July 2016
Accepted: 14 July 2016
Address for Correspondence:
Jeffrey Beall, MA, MSLS
Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver, 1100 Lawrence
St. Denver, Co 80204, USA
E-mail: jeffrey.beall@ucdenver.edu
http://dx.doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2016.31.10.1511
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J Korean Med Sci 2016; 31: 1511-1513
DIAGNOSIS: PREDATORY PUBLISHERS
You probably have received many spam emails from unfamiliar
publishers and journals inviting you to submit your research
manuscripts for publication or to serve on a new journal’s edi-
torial board. e emails typically promise a fast and easy pub-
lishing process and make claims about the “high quality” of the
journal, bragging about where it is indexed and about the high
metrics it has earned.
Many such emails come from what I have termed ‘predatory
publishers’. Predatory publishers generally charge authors to
publish their research articles but make the content freely avail-
able on the internet. This model is called gold (author-pays)
open access. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this
publishing model, the predatory publishers have exploited weak-
nesses in the model and seek only to earn as much money as
possible from researchers. eir websites may appear similar to
those of high quality publishers, but they are counterfeit, and
most do not perform a standard peer review. ey prefer to quick-
ly accept and publish as many papers as possible, so they can
earn money from scholarly authors.
Thus, by definition, predatory publishers and journals are
those that exploit the gold open-access model for their own prof-
it. I understand that the term predatory does not translate well
into all languages, and some prefer to use other terms, like van-
ity publisher, or parasitic publisher. Whatever name you prefer,
these publishers are a threat to science, a threat to academic eval-
uation, and a threat to scholarly communication itself.
Many predatory publishers pretend they are ‘associations’ or
‘institutes’, and they publish journals whose titles are similar to
the titles of established and respected journals. Often they in-
corporate terms such as International, or Global, or Universal
into the journal titles to attract submissions from authors need-
ing a publication in an international journal. As mentioned, they
use spam email to solicit article submissions, and many give
false information about their headquarters locations, claiming
to be based, for example, in London or New York, when they
are really based in South Asia or West Africa. Often predatory
journals claim they have ‘impact factors’ when they really do
not, and there are now companies that supply fake impact fac-
tors to such journals.
Many predatory publishers use boastful language, claiming
that their journals are ‘leading journals’ in their elds, and many
claim to be indexed in Scopus when they are not indexed any-
where except in Google Scholar, which aims to be comprehen-
sive and includes most journals, regardless of their quality.
Overall, predatory publishers are not transparent about where
they are based, who the owners are, and what other publishers
they are associated with. They use deception to trick authors
into submitting papers, and they do not follow the established
standards and practices of the scholarly publishing industry.
Unwary authors sometimes respond to a publisher’s spam
email by forwarding a manuscript. In some cases, the publish-
ers immediately publish the paper, with no peer review and no
revisions requested. en the author is surprised by an invoice
from the publisher, sometimes for over two thousand dollars.
At this point, the author becomes suspicious and emails the
publisher asking for the manuscript to be withdrawn. But the
predatory publisher refuses to withdraw the paper unless a
‘withdrawal fee’ is paid. e author has the choice of paying the
publishing fee or the withdrawal fee, and the author cannot
submit the paper to another journal because it is already pub-
lished. e predatory publisher holds the paper as a ‘hostage’
until the ‘ransom’ is paid.
OPINION
Editing, Writing & Publishing
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I rst started writing about predatory publishers in 2009 and
coined the term predatory publisher in 2010 (1). I publish a blog
called Scholarly Open Access (http://scholarlyoa.com) that in-
cludes a list of predatory publishers, and the list now has over
one thousand entries. A second list includes predatory or ques-
tionable standalone journals. ese are low-quality or predato-
ry journals that exist alone on the Internet, with no named pub-
lisher. Many of these are mega-journals and have broad scopes.
They want to accept as many papers as possible so they can
generate more revenue from authors. My blog also includes
commentary on predatory journals, with two blog posts pub-
lished each week.
THE DAMAGE THAT PREDATORY PUBLISHERS
CAUSE
By far, predatory publishers damage science more than anything
else. ey do not faithfully manage peer review, allowing ques-
tionable science to be published as if it had passed a strong peer
review. We know that peer review often results in papers being
rejected for publication, but this rejection is contrary to the busi-
ness model of many open-access publishers, because they only
want to generate as much revenue as possible.
Peer review also helps authors nd and eliminate errors be-
fore the nal version of the scientic article is prepared and pub-
lished. Peer review benets authors and benets science itself.
We also know that research is cumulative, and new research
builds on the foundations established by earlier research. When
writing scientic articles, many researchers rst search the schol-
arly literature to discover what earlier research has been pub-
lished on the particular scientic question they seek to answer.
Because of predatory journals and their negligent peer review
management, now many unscientic articles have been pub-
lished. e scientic literature has become polluted, bringing
the cumulative nature of research into doubt.
When doing literature searches, researchers should take care
in deciding which articles to cite and which to ignore. If a scien-
tic paper cites earlier articles published in predatory journals,
it may itself be considered questionable. Unfortunately, some
scholarly databases have not been careful and have included
the content of predatory journals. One example is Google Schol-
ar. For those researchers wanting to avoid low-quality academic
indexes, academic librarians are able to recommend high qual-
ity scholarly indexes.
Now many predatory journals accept and publish ‘advocacy
research’. This type of research supports a particular political,
religious, or social agenda using questionable science that nor-
mally would not pass through peer review. For example, some
have written that asbestos is non-toxic, but the articles making
this claim originated from the asbestos industry. Anti-nuclear
researchers have published research ‘concluding’ that nuclear
power plants are more harmful than honest science has found.
Others have written articles claiming a newly-discovered drug
is efficacious, hoping to attract investors and even selling the
drug over the Internet without government approval.
Another problem predatory journals have made possible is
the publication of pseudo-science. One eld of study that seems
to regularly attract pseudo-scientists is cosmology. There are
open, unanswered questions in cosmology, including the ques-
tion of the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Some research-
ers have used the easy publishing process that predatory pub-
lishers oer to ‘answer’ these questions. Others write to ‘correct’
Einstein or Newton. eir articles tend to be written in such a
way that it is dicult to prove or disprove them. Papers denying
climate change or the anthropogenic nature of climate change
are also commonly published in predatory journals.
Academic evaluation has been negatively aected by preda-
tory journals. For many decades, universities relied on the schol-
arly publishing industry to properly manage peer review and to
enforce selectivity in science and other research. But now, get-
ting an article published is easy — all one has to do is deliver a
manuscript and pay the fee. Unfortunately, many universities
have not updated their evaluation policies to account for the
existence of predatory journals. Too many of them look only at
the number of publications, ignoring the quality of the journal
where the research appears.
This problem has led to some university faculty taking ad-
vantage of the easy publishing process in low-quality journals.
ey quickly publish several journal articles while honest col-
leagues publish a smaller number of articles but in higher qual-
ity journals. However, the university only looks at the number
of articles each researcher has published, giving an unfair ad-
vantage to those using predatory journals.
Not all researchers who publish in predatory journals are ex-
ploiting the easy publishing, however. I call such journals pred-
atory because they aim to trick honest researchers, and often
they are successful at this. So sometimes we see good research
published in bad journals, because an honest researcher has
been fooled by the predator.
Sometimes spam emails come at just the wrong time. Because
top journals are selective, they frequently reject articles, even
good ones. is can cause a sense of despair for the authors (2).
Sometimes, when this happens, the author receives a spam email
from a predatory journal inviting him/her to submit a paper.
Because (s)he is depressed, (s)he submits the paper to the pred-
atory journal, where it is quickly published. Later, the author re-
grets the bad decision. e predatory publisher is happy because
it has easily earned money from the researcher.
Some medical researchers have been tricked by predatory
journals that use graphic medical pictures to make themselves
look legitimate. If you see a publisher website or receive a spam
email that contains pictures of surgical procedures, it may be a
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predatory publisher.
Open-access journals with higher impact factors tend to charge
higher fees to authors. is higher pricing may exclude resear-
chers without funding from participating in scholarly publish-
ing. There are some open-access journals that do not charge
fees, however.
OTHER SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING SCAMS
You probably have also received many spam emails from con-
ference organizers. These ‘predatory conferences’ solicit sub-
missions much like predatory journals do. Typically, they spam
frequently, they hold many conferences in many cities each year,
and they organize ve or more conferences simultaneously at
the same hotel. e conferences are often held in resort cities.
Some conference organizers make deals with predatory pub-
lishers and arrange for the conference paper to be published in
one of their journals. A good way to avoid predatory conferenc-
es is to nd non-prot scholarly societies in your eld and at-
tend only conferences organized by respected and established
scholarly organizations or associations.
Researchers should also be aware of ‘hijacked’ journals. ese
are respected journals, usually with an impact factor from om-
son Reuters, for which someone has created a counterfeit web-
site. e counterfeiters then send spam emails, acting as if they
were the real publishers of the journal. ey accept all submis-
sions and charge the authors. eir victims are typically authors
seeking fast publishing in impact factor journals.
I mentioned fake impact factors earlier. ere is only a single
source of the authentic impact factors, and this is a product called
Journal Citation Reports
®
published by omson Reuters. Bo-
gus rms now make up and sell or license bogus impact factors
to open-access journals. The journals then display these fake
impact factors on their websites and in their spam email, hop-
ing that researchers will believe the journal has an authentic
impact factor or is a legitimate journal. If the impact factor is
important to you, always verify a journal’s claim that it has earned
an impact factor. Your university librarian can help with this.
CONCLUSION
Scholarly open-access publishing arrived with great promise,
but in many cases it has been exploited by predatory publishers
who only seek to profit from honest researchers. By learning
about how these fake publishers operate, researchers can avoid
them and be sure their research is submitted to and published
in high quality academic journals.
DISCLOSURE
e author has no potential conicts of interest to disclose.
ORCID
Jerey Beall http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9012-5330
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2010; 11: 10-7.
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