Punitive provision to tackle predatory journals

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal), 2021

Predatory journals that pretended to resemble refereed journals but are used for moneymaking purposes. Predatory publishers produce less quality scientific and research papers; it is a severe academic threat in scientific publications. Researchers are ensuring the quality of the journal and peer-reviewing process before submitting the manuscript. This paper aims to know the Indian Library and Information Science faculties awareness and knowledge about Predatory journals. To this study, 67 LIS (Library and Information Science) faculties took part, and they are working as Assistant Professors (67.2%), Associate Professors (16.4%) and Professors (16.4%) of various states (31.3%) and central universities (68.7%) in India. The study results found 89.6% of faculty knew the term Predatory, 80.6% knew how to identify the predatory, most of them knew differing predatory, 92.5% of respondents were aware of the open access system, and most of them knew legitimate journals. The study's findings revealed LIS faculties knew predatory journals publish a high number of low-quality papers without proper peer review. The T value is-13.22, and the faculty members' opinions based on self-awareness of publishing papers have a significant highest mean value of 3.71.

Library Philosophy and Practice, 2021

The publication journey for most of the researchers starts from the Ph. D. onwards. University guidelines for the Ph. D. enable the researchers to publish one or two papers in peer-reviewed journals. The inexperienced or young researchers are in a hurry in the process of publishing their articles. They are unaware of the predatory journals and they publish their articles in these predatory journals. The focus of the present paper is to create awareness among the young researchers and offer some basic knowledge so that they can avoid publishing in predatory journals.

2021

The publication journey for most of the researchers starts from the Ph. D. onwards. University guidelines for the Ph. D. enable the researchers to publish one or two papers in peer-reviewed journals. The inexperienced or young researchers are in a hurry in the process of publishing their articles. They are unaware of the predatory journals and they publish their articles in these predatory journals. The focus of the present paper is to create awareness among the young researchers and offer some basic knowledge so that they can avoid publishing in predatory journals.

F1000Research

Background: There is no standardized definition of what a predatory journal is, nor have the characteristics of these journals been delineated or agreed upon. In order to study the phenomenon precisely a definition of predatory journals is needed. The objective of this scoping review is to summarize the literature on predatory journals, describe its epidemiological characteristics, and to extract empirical descriptions of potential characteristics of predatory journals. Methods: We searched five bibliographic databases: Ovid MEDLINE, Embase Classic + Embase, ERIC, and PsycINFO, and Web of Science on January 2nd, 2018. A related grey literature search was conducted March 27th, 2018. Eligible studies were those published in English after 2012 that discuss predatory journals. Titles and abstracts of records obtained were screened. We extracted epidemiological characteristics from all search records discussing predatory journals. Subsequently, we extracted statements from the empirical ...

Nature

promise was doubtful and its validity unlikely to have been vetted. Predatory journals are a global threat. They accept articles for publication-along with authors' fees-without performing promised quality checks for issues such as plagiarism or ethical approval. Naive readers are not the only victims. Many researchers have been duped into submitting to predatory journals, in which their work can be overlooked. One study that focused on 46,000 researchers based in Italy found that about 5% of them published in such outlets 1. A separate analysis suggests predatory publishers collect millions of dollars in publication fees that are ultimately paid out by funders such as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) 2. One barrier to combating predatory publishing is, in our view, the lack of an agreed definition. By analogy, consider the historical criteria for deciding whether an abnormal bulge in the aorta, the largest artery in the body, could be deemed an aneurysm-a dangerous W hen 'Jane' turned to alternative medicine, she had already exhausted radiotherapy, chemotherapy and other standard treatments for breast cancer. Her alternative-medicine practitioner shared an article about a therapy involving vitamin infusions. To her and her practitioner, it seemed to be authentic grounds for hope. But when Jane showed the article to her son-in-law (one of the authors of this Comment), he realized it came from a predatory journal-meaning its Leading scholars and publishers from ten countries have agreed a definition of predatory publishing that can protect scholarship. It took 12 hours of discussion, 18 questions and 3 rounds to reach.

Journal of Postgraduate Medical Institute, 2020

There has been a major trend in academic publishing from traditional print publication to open access journals and online publication in recent times. The authors now find more avenues to publish their work than before, but at the same time vulnerable to become prey to predatory journals. The term ”Predatory Journals” was first coined by Jeffrey Beall 1 , Associate Professor and librarian at the university of Colorado Denver. According to Beall predatory publisher is one“which publish counterfeit journals to exploit the open access model in which the author pays.” The most recent clear, comprehensive and consensus definition of predatory journal was formulated in April 2019 in Ottawa, Canada by 43 researchers belonging to 10 different countries. 2 Their definition reads“ 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 prac...

Toxicologic Pathology, 2020

Predatory journals—also called fraudulent, deceptive, or pseudo-journals—are publications that claim to be legitimate scholarly journals but misrepresent their publishing practices. Some common forms of predatory publishing practices include falsely claiming to provide peer review, hiding information about article processing charges, misrepresenting members of the journal’s editorial board, and other violations of copyright or scholarly ethics. Because of their increasing prevalence, this article aims to provide helpful information for authors on how to identify and avoid predatory journals.

Current Science

Scholarly journals play an important role in maintaining the quality and integrity of research by what they publish. Unethical practices in publishing are leading to an increased number of predatory, dubious and low-quality journals worldwide. It has been reported that the percentage of research articles published in predatory journals is high in India. The University Grants Commission (UGC), New Delhi has published an 'approved list of journals', which has been criticized due to inclusion of many substandard journals. We have developed a protocol with objective criteria for identifying journals that do not follow good publication practices. We studied 1336 journals randomly selected from 5699 in the university source component of the 'UGC-approved list'. We analysed 1009 journals after excluding 327 indexed in Scopus/Web of Science. About 34.5% of the 1009 journals were disqualified under the basic criteria because of incorrect or non-availability of essential information such as address, website details and names of editors; another 52.3% of them provided false information such as incorrect ISSN, false claims about impact factor, claimed indexing in dubious indexing databases or had poor credentials of editors. Our results suggest that over 88% of the non-indexed journals in the university source component of the UGC-approved list, included on the basis of suggestions from different universities, could be of low quality. In view of these results, the current UGC-approved list of journals needs serious re-consideration. New regulations to curtail unethical practices in scientific publishing along with organization of awareness programmes about publication ethics at Indian universities and research institutes are urgently needed.

This sequential explanatory mixed-methods study investigated where predatory/fake journals (PFJs) are founded, which countries' researchers publish more frequently in PFJs, the identity of the editors of PFJs, why researchers publish in PFJs, and what factors encourage such publications. A survey and semi-structured follow-up interviews were used to collect data. The results indicate that the majority of PFJs are located in developing countries ; 119 journals provided incorrect postal addresses; the greatest number of researchers who published in PFJs are from India, Nigeria, and Turkey, suggesting that most of the publications in PFJs are submitted by researchers in developing countries; the interviewed Turkish researchers submitted their articles to PFJs in pursuit of rapid academic promotion ; the incentive allowance system encourages researchers to publish in PFJs; and the well-known " publish-or-perish " pressure and unawareness are other potential factors that drive participants to submit their papers to PFJs.

The Serials Librarian, 2020

The rise of predatory journals and the dubious methods they use to attract researchers to publish in them and serve on their editorial boards is disrupting the scholarly publishing landscape. It is increasingly difficult to distinguish between legitimate and predatory articles and journals. Two views of this challenging landscape were presented during NASIG's 34 th Annual Conference. Marydee Ojala, a former academic/corporate librarian and currently editor of a magazine for librarians, outlined dangers such as pirated versions of scholarly articles and concerns that the inclusion of inaccurate and incoherent "sting" articles in Open Access journals has soured the general public's attitude towards scientific expertise. In a "fake news" world, debasing scholarly research is a potent threat to academic disciplines and to libraries. Regina Reynolds, the head of the U.S ISSN Center, recounted the experiences of ISSN staff on the front lines of dealing with the full range of new publishers and explored the broader questions raised by the predatory publishing phenomenon. Libraries, academia, traditional publishers, and others need to continue grappling with their roles and responsibilities regarding this new reality.