The predatory publishing phenomenon: dead end or just an inconvenience on the road to a new scholarly publishing landscape?

Abstract

Exploitation of the open access (OA) model by unscrupulous publishers can seem a threat to the future of scholarly publishing. Some see the proliferation of these publishers as a simple case of bad actors who need to be stopped. Further reflection and reading can lead to a realization that the situation is not nearly as simple as bad guys vs. good guys. Rather, what is happening can be seen as a natural outgrowth of the ease of publishing on the internet and the rise of OA publishing. A global economic market for publishing scholarly articles on the internet has emerged and is responsible in part for this phenomenon. There is a continuum of publishers that some term 'predatory' which ranges from clueless new publishers to outright frauds. The good news is that the emergence of this phenomenon has resulted in the development of professional associations, educational movements and best practices that can help educate authors, publishers, researchers and academia alike. In the end the situation might turn out to be one of 'temporary inconvenience, permanent improvement'.

Fear of the academic fake? Journal editorials and the amplification of the 'predatory publishing' discourse

“…The US company Cabells sells its own lists to universities. Despite a growing number of critiques of the notion of ‘predatory journals’ as overly simplistic (Reynolds, 2016), bundling together poor quality with misconduct (Eriksson & Helgesson, 2018), and ignoring the concerns of scholars in emerging research universities (Smart, 2017), the discourse, and the list‐making, continue.…”

Revisiting the Term Predatory Open Access Publishing

“…Researchers suggest that low-cost, open access publishing serves a useful purpose in the global arena 41718. Giving space to regional journals would help to reduce deceptive publishing practices, and help socioeconomically disadvantaged authors to publish in legitimate, open-access journals at no or low cost 2.…”

Time to stop talking about ‘predatory journals’

“…When this is the case, we see a kind of symbiosis between less conscientious researchers and greedy publishers. There are, of course, others who might fall prey to the practices, like researchers who fail to realize whom they are dealing with, the public unknowingly reading ‘facts’ that have not been scrutinized, and libraries giving access to or even promoting questionable journals (Reynolds, ). One might also say, as a manner of speaking, that these journals are feeding on the established scientific publication system while intentionally failing to live up to the expected practice of using proper peer review.…”

“…It blinds us to important possibilities, needs, and questions . Pippa Smart () and Regina Reynolds () have both claimed that the rise of low‐cost, open publishing in the global arena can serve a good purpose. Gathering a wide variety of problems under the broad notion of ‘predatory publishing’ might cause us to overreact and too easily look at fairly low‐cost, open‐access journals as all evil: “Might the label ‘predatory publishing’ harm the cause of open access?…”

“…Or inhibit publishing in developing countries? More importantly, might the blanket condemnation of non‐traditional publishing deprive science and scholarship of valuable discoveries and insights going forward?” (Reynolds, ). In a somewhat similar vein, Kirsten Bell argues that we should treat these journals as parodical rather than predatory, thus encouraging “us to ask difficult but necessary questions about the commercial context of knowledge production, prevailing conceptions of quality and value, and the ways in which they privilege scholarship from the ‘centre’ and exclude that from the ‘periphery’” (Bell, ).…”