Predatory publishing, also known as deceptive or write-only publishing, occurs where journals charge authors publication fees without providing the legitimate editorial, peer review, and publishing services traditionally expected from established journals.
Although charging publication fees is usual practice in academic journals, it goes without saying that reputable publishers are expected to ensure proper quality control, editorial oversight, and peer review in return.
Increasingly, concerns have been raised within the research community that so-called predatory publishers, often accept articles without adequately assessing their quality, validity, or originality, prioritising their own profit over academic integrity, they may also hide information about costs related to article processing, misrepresent members of the journal’s editorial board, or make other violations of copyright or research ethics.
Regrettably, authors who unknowingly submit their work to such journals may also encounter excessive withdrawal fees when attempting to retract their manuscripts.
How can potentially predatory journals be identified?
While not always easy to spot, there are online resources, such as, but not limited to, the “Think. Check. Submit” tool, which aim to help researchers looking to publish their findings to choose reputable journals. In doing so, they raise predatory publishing as an area of concern. In fact, such is the concern over the matter that lists of ‘predatory journals’ and ‘potentially predatory journals’ are available to be consulted online by researchers. Researchers can also use established directories like the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) or consult their institutional library for trusted publishing guidelines.
Overall, there are several issues common to predatory journals that can be looked out for:
Journal title: A title that is easily confused with another journal or one that might mislead potential authors and readers about the journal’s origin, scope or association with other journals.
Journal Scope: Has a very wide scope meaning that the journal covers a wide range of areas or topics.
Journal Credentials: Unclear ownership of the journal, and no publisher address or contact information is provided; mimicking the name or web site style of more established journals; and displays of unofficial impact factors – a metric used in academia to measure the importance and prestige of a scientific journal – and/or makes false claims of being indexed in major services like PubMed or DOAJ as if they were prestigious or reputable bibliographic databases.
Journal Processes: Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles; advertises very fast times from submission to publication – in reality, this should be dependent on the time taken for independent peer review to be completed (which can take months, and in some cases, more than a year); lack of information on the policies of the journal, such as peer review, licensing and copyright; hides information on charges or only notifies academics of article fees after papers are accepted.
Publishing: Publishes out-of-scope or ‘nonsense’ articles; has poor or non-existent editing of articles (many spelling mistakes or very poor grammar); accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control, including mediocre and fake papers; interfere with the editorial process to ensure acceptance of low-quality articles.
Editorial board: Aggressively campaigning for academics to serve on editorial boards; listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission; no editorial board is listed, or the editorial board comprises dead or retired scholars or scholars who are not specialised in the topic; appointing fake academics to editorial boards; and allow editors to publish repeatedly in the journals they command.
What are the potential issues with research papers published in predatory journals?
As these ‘predatory journals’ do not subject the articles they publish to rigorous peer review, publications may be flawed, of low quality, or have misleading results. This means that there is the potential for spread of misinformation where untested research—especially in fields like medicine or environmental science—can misinform the public and other researchers.
Other issues include that without peer feedback, authors miss the opportunity to correct mistakes and strengthen their methodology, and to defend their work to peers when responding to reviewer’s comments – this is important at all career stages but can be especially important for early career researchers. It is worth noting that although the scientific peer review process is not perfect, as it relies on often overworked researchers providing their time on a voluntary basis, the academic community widely agrees it is the “least worst” system available for upholding scientific standards and filtering out low-quality work.
Where research is of high quality but published in a predatory journal, researchers risk damage to their professional reputation as their valid work sits alongside substandard papers, meaning good research may get overlooked and not built upon or cited. Indirectly, this may impact their chances of securing funding or academic roles going forward.
Potential difficulties for ME/CFS researchers
In a phenomenon known as ‘publication bias’, journal editors and peer reviewers generally favour statistically significant or novel results, especially those which are ‘groundbreaking’– rather than those from small scale studies, or those which do not find anything significant – believing they boost the journal’s impact factor, generate more reader interest, and increase citations (how many times the journal is referred to in other publications).
Regrettably, due to the lack of large-scale funding available, ME/CFS research is often exploratory, or limited by factors including small sample sizes, use of pre-existing data, and self-reported information, meaning that the findings do not have the same potential for impact as larger studies with substantial financial resources. This means that it is harder to get ME/CFS studies published in high impact journals, and researchers have a smaller pool of credible journals to submit to, potentially preventing ME/CFS studies from being published, delaying their publication, or meaning that the only viable option for some ME/CFS researchers is to publish in potentially predatory journals.
It is also worth noting that it is very difficult to secure peer-reviewers, both generally due to the time-consuming nature of the voluntary role, and more specifically in ME/CFS research as few researchers possess the expertise required to review research into the disease to a high standard. This means that many scientists would reject an invitation to review for a reputable journal feeling they would be unable to do the job justice (especially as reviewers reports are often published alongside reviewer names), further delaying the publication process.
Conclusions
Predatory journals have been highlighted amongst the academic community as problematic; not only do they take advantage of researchers by charging publication fees without completing rigorous peer review, but they also publish articles that may be flawed, of low quality, or have misleading results. This has implications for further research; especially review articles which combine the results of several different studies together, and for the practices – such as healthcare – based on it.
It is recommended that researchers are aware of, and avoid publishing work in predatory or potentially predatory journals, instead aiming for those which adhere to rigorous scientific standards, including thorough peer review.
