Scholarly Communications Guide for Faculty, Staff: Predatory Publishers

What's on this page?

[From Queensborough Community College Library]

Check the publisher and journal on the predatory publishing lists linked to on this guide. 

Contact your department's Library Liaison for a second (or first) opinion about the authenticity of a publisher or journal. We're happy to help faculty identify reliable, quality scholarly publishing venues. 

Use the following checklist, provided by Declan Butler in Nature, as a guide for assessing publishers and journals:

How to perform due diligence before submitting to a journal or publisher.

• Check that the publisher provides full, verifiable contact information, including address, on the journal site. Be cautious of those that provide only web contact forms.

• Check that a journal's editorial board lists recognized experts with full affiliations. Contact some of them and ask about their experience with the journal or publisher.

• Check that the journal prominently displays its policy for author fees.

• Be wary of e-mail invitations to submit to journals or to become editorial board members.

• Read some of the journal's published articles and assess their quality. Contact past authors to ask about their experience.

• Check that a journal's peer-review process is clearly described and try to confirm that a claimed impact factor is correct.

• Find out whether the journal is a member of an industry association that vets its members, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (www.oaspa.org). [Some questionable journals appear in directories such as DOAJ and Cabell's; we don't advise using this as your sole criteria.]

• Use common sense, as you would when shopping online: if something looks fishy, proceed with caution.

• Or contact your Librarian! We're happy to help assess journals and publishers.

More checklists, indicators and rubrics to use in your evaluation:

"Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices." (Nature). 

Red flags that may indicate a "predatory journal."

► Email invitation to submit, especially after presenting at a conference

► Advertises extremely fast time to publication

► No information or inaccurate information about editors and editorial board

► Contact only through online form, no direct email or street address

► "Indexed" only in search engines, rather than curated resources like subscription databases or Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

► Published articles don't adhere to stated scope of journal or scope is so broad as to include most topics

[From John Jay College of Criminal Justice LibGuide]

Beall's List of "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers": Beall is a librarian at the University of Colorado who closely monitored the seedy side of open access publishing.  

NOTE: Beall's List website was taken down in January 2017 and is no longer being updated. There's been speculation as to why. Archived versions of the lists are available, including at:

Publishers: Archive.is | Archive.org
Standalone journals: Archive.is | Archive.org
Hijacked journals: Archive.is | Archive.org
Metric companies: Archive.is | Archive.org

From the original site: 

"This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. We recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards.  The criteria for determining predatory publishers are here.

We hope that tenure and promotion committees can also decide for themselves how importantly or not to rate articles published in these journals in the context of their own institutional standards and/or geocultural locus.  We emphasize that journal publishers and journals change in their business and editorial practices over time. This list is kept up-to-date to the best extent possible but may not reflect sudden, unreported, or unknown enhancements."

[From John Jay College of Criminal Justice LibGuide]

This is a non-exhaustive list.  The economics of open access publishing are evolving; note that article processing charges are not unique to open access publishing - reputable biomedical titles in particular have long used them for subscription journals.  Long-established conventional journal publishers are expanding their reach into open access, with new titles, or moving old titles into open access, or hybrid titles with some articles open access and others behind a paywall.