Predatory publishing in management research: A call for open peer review

Abstract

Predatory journals have emerged as an unintended consequence of the Open Access paradigm. Predatory journals only supposedly or very superficially conduct peer review and accept manuscripts within days to skim off publication fees. In this provocation piece, we first explain how predatory journals exploit deficiencies of the traditional peer review process in times of Open Access publishing. We then explain two ways in which predatory journals may harm the management discipline: as an infrastructure for the dissemination of pseudo-science and as a vehicle to portray management research as pseudo-scientific. Analyzing data from a journal blacklist, we show that without the ability to validate their claims to conduct peer review, most of the 639 predatory management journals are quite difficult to demarcate from serious journals. To address this problem, we propose open peer review as a new governance mechanism for management journals. By making parts of their peer review process more transparent and inclusive, reputable journals can differentiate themselves from predatory journals and additionally contribute to a more developmental reviewing culture. Eventually, we discuss ways in which editors, reviewers, and authors can advocate reform of peer review.

Publishing at Any Cost? The Need for the Improvement of the Quality of Scholarly Publications

“…In a very clear way, Dobusch and Heimstä dt (2019) sustain that a sound and straightforward peer-review process is one of the most important ways that high-profile journals have to distinguish from predatory journals. The authors further propose that "journals can experiment with open identities, open reports, and some types of open platforms.…”

“…Although there is not a unique definition of predatory journals or publishers (e.g., Beall, 2012;Avelar-Rodriguez, 2019), which makes it difficult to apprehend and fight them, Cukier et al (2019) sustain that this sort of journals "[…] have self-interest as a goal, and are often motivated to accept as many articles as possible to profit from article processing charges (APCs) which are common at OA journals" (p. 5). As a consequence, these publishers and the journals they are responsible for sacrifice quality control of articles beforehand, upon their publication and in the post-publication stage (with the possibility of retraction, for example), concurrently with their rapid acceptance and publication (Shrestha et al, 2019;Liyanapathirana, 2019;Dobusch & Heimstä dt, 2019) with excessive email spam (Wood & Krasowski, 2020;Avelar-Rodriguez, 2019;Grudniewicz et al, 2019). Avelar-Rodriguez (2019) is a heavy critic of this positioning and warns that the only goal of predatory journals is to profit financially from the publication of research that has frequently low quality, but since the authors pay for the publication fee, their papers are published, regardless of their scientific soundness.…”

“…Terms such as predatory journal, among others, may be wrongfully used to characterise these journals and fail to reflect the different levels of quality of the high number of scholarly journals. Dobusch, & Heimstä dt (2019) offer a set of types of open-access journals that have below-average quality, detailed in Table 3. (2019) describe these three types of open-access journals as follows: (i) Aspirant journalshave low quality in terms of publications and peer-reviewers.…”

“…A more transparent and inclusive peer-review process, being open to public scrutiny, may add to the solution by separating quality journals from others, thus legitimising the former (Dobusch & Heimstä dt, 2019;Teixeira da Silva & Tsigaris, 2018;To & Yu, 2020;Serpa & Ferreira, 2019). Table 5 provides an overview of open peer-review practices and their description.…”

The Open Innovation in Science research field: a collaborative conceptualisation approach

“…In the realm of scientific publishing, the article processing charge (APC) model of open access has opened the door to so-called predatory journals, which imitate legitimate titles but fail to provide a thorough review process. Researchers may unwittingly submit to journals like these without verifying their reputability or even do so strategically in pursuit of an easy publication (Dobusch and Heimstädt 2019;Sorokowski et al 2017). Negative impacts like these are not necessarily inherent to openness and collaboration, but reflect interdependencies with other aspects of the science system that demand to be addressed.…”