We would also like the reader to take note of the findings from a multi-year, international study in which predatory journals and their use by early career researchers (ECRs) and their perceptions and use of OA journals. From the paper’s abstract we note the following [271]:
“The paper draws on evidence of predatory publishing obtained from the 4 year-long Harbingers research study of the changing scholarly communication attitudes and behaviour of early career researchers (ECRs). The project featured longitudinal interviews for its first 3 years with 116 ECRs researching science and social sciences who came from China, France, Malaysia, Poland, Spain, UK and USA. The interview data provided the building blocks for a questionnaire survey in the 4th year, which obtained 1600 responses from a global audience, which included arts and humanities ECRs and those from Russia. These studies investigated predatory publishing as part of general questioning about scholarly communications, in other words, in context. The main finding from the interview study were:
1) ECRs generally do not publish in predatory journals;
2) they only allude to them lightly and mainly in the context of open access publishing;
3) they no longer acquaint all open access publishing with predatory journals.
The questionnaire found that, as in the case of the interviews, complaints that open access is low quality publishing are diminishing, however, this positivity has been partly offset by increased concerns about the dangers of predatory journals.”
However, although we agree with the findings of the study, the real question is why? In reality, from our extensive real-world, hands-on, day-to-day battle in the academic publishing trenches, we would suggest the following reasons:
1. Many institutions now recognize the Beall lists as useful tools to weed out journals which are ‘predatory’. As such, if a journal or publisher’s name was published on these lists, they can’t be use. However, we still maintain Mr. Beall went way too far in his zeal for finding and listing both journals and publishers that he perceived as ‘predatory’. Two cases quickly come to mind: MDPI [150 – 153] and SciAlert.
2. As the above paper suggests, other ‘predatory’ lists are being curated. One example is Cabell’s [73, 178]. However, we find the price of this list to be far beyond the capabilities of most faculty and university budgets. See our discussion of this in this handbook.
3. Most institutions now require journals be in a recognized index, such as Scopus, SJR, or ISI. The PRC has opted to go down a different road in the matter [49, 64, 88, 101 – 102, 207 – 209].
4. As time has gone by, a newer generation of questionable journals has arisen. Some have even managed to get indexed in the above reputable indexes. For this reason, some institutions now require their academics and researchers to publish in journals ranked as Q1 and Q2 in Scopus, but not Q3 or Q4. Usually Q3 and Q4 are reserved for graduate student papers.
5. Also, we feel Scopus has become more aggressive in weeding out the ‘bad apple’ journals that have questionable publishing ethics/processes. Evidence of this can be found on the Scopus discontinued spreadsheet which is published online [260].
Last updated 2020 December 29
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