As scientific publishing shifts from a business model of subscription revenue to open access, the number of open access journals has exploded. However, the proliferation of journals that will publish seemingly anything for a fee has caused alarm among many in the global research community. Alongside many respected open access publishers, others have entered the space acting in bad faith. Some see it as the “dark side” of open access, a growing collection of pseudo-academic, prestigiously titled journals, many of which have similar but not quite identical websites and names to those of well-known established journals. Many of the websites look sufficiently impressive that non-experts doing online research have trouble distinguishing credible research from junk. Experienced academics have been misled into submitting manuscripts and even serving on editorial boards for pseudo-academic journals, agreements that often are difficult to undo. Most of these journals do not post their publication fees, and often authors are not informed of fees until after submitting a manuscript. Withdrawal of a manuscript, which is necessary before submitting the same paper to a legitimate journal, may require payment of the high fees first [12]. For some authors, this means their work may be lost essentially to the disreputable publisher. Many researchers have complained about poorly executed or absent peer review, hidden fees for submission and publication, and unapproved inclusion of researchers’ names on editorial boards.
Jeffrey Beall, a librarian and associate professor at Auraria Library at the University of Colorado, Denver, coined the term “predatory open access publishing” to describe this situation. He is a critic of open access publishing, blaming the system for creating the problem of predatory publishers. His blog Scholarly Open Access, although removed by Beall for unknown reasons in January 2017, closely monitored the increasing number of open access publishers and alerted readers to individuals, publishers, publications, meetings, and scholarly metrics that, in the view of Mr Beall, appeared to exploit the open access model [13]. He maintained a list of “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers” and another list of standalone journals. His criteria for inclusion on the lists were derived from the Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing from COPE, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the World Association of Medical Editors [14,14,15,16]. Similarly, information in these communications may help authors to discern whether they can trust a particular publisher or journal. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the USA has taken notice of questionable publication practices. In August 2016 it filed a suit against the OMICS Group, a global conglomerate based in India that publishes more than 700 open access journals. The suit claimed that the OMICS Group misled researchers, particularly with regard to their peer-review process (or lack thereof) and high fees that were not readily apparent to authors upon manuscript submission [17]. The purpose of the lawsuit, according to the FTC, is to better inform authors of publishing fees and to have a more transparent peer-review system [18]. The case is still to be litigated in federal court in Nevada at the time of writing this article.
The challenge for watchdogs and authors alike is to decide when a publisher is untrustworthy or simply unprofessional. Some publishers may fall under suspicion due to poor copy editing or amateurish website design, but this may not reflect an outright neglect of scholarly standards. It is important not to blacklist startup publishers who lack experience. Another problem with maintaining lists of disreputable publishers is that because copycat journals are often short-lived, the blacklist will continue to grow but individual entries may quickly become obsolete.