Following

I am in Support of Dr Bankole's submission. It has nothing to do with countries, rather, meeting the criteria to be enlisted in such bodies.

Presently, there are lots of predatory journals under different disguise all in the bid to make money.

Some will even use similar name as the indexed journals and could omit or add 's' to differentiate which you will barely notice. It has happened to me before and I felt deceived by such journals.

I have also had the experience of asking my journal under review to be withdrawn before after I realized they are not what I thought, but the journal threatened that I must pay certain charges.

@Bankole and Soyemi, thank you for your submissions.

But what can be done seeing that most of our higher institutions have one journal or more and most of them, if not all, are not listed in JCR?

It behoves on the Editorial Board of the journal to redefine its philosophy - what it actually intend to achieve in the field of academics. Is the journal floated to contribute to knowledge on a larger scale, or is it out there for mere generation of revenue by the managers; as is the case in most developing countries?

Journal managers owe it as a great deal of responsibility to academics to disseminate quality information arising from qualitative research reports, right from the selection process of the Editorial Board to the peer review process of the articles. By so doing, a journal will attract the attention it deserves when the managers apply to any indexing organization for scrutiny.

Thanks.

Journal must have ISSN, good review and editorial process, good indexing, and DOI. Majority of journals in developing nations often have ISSN but lack one of the other criteria.

https://scholcomm.columbia.edu/how-do-you-know-a-journal-is-legitimate/

However, we cannot condemned all because they have deficit, we should also look into the conditions of the researchers in developing countries. Virtually, there is no publication fund from the institutions, they often use their income to support their career. How many can afford $500-1000 on publication in some of these highly indexed journals.

Alternatively, if the journal has subscribers, how many of researchers in developing countries have access to sophisticated equipment that will may their work manuscript to be admitted to journals on Nature, Springer, Elsevier. However, most researchers in developing nations are making waves in journals of publishers which are listed on www.doaj.org

Moreover, the important thing is not the money you pay for publication, it is the novelty of the work. Some of these good journals that accept publication fees, often use it to keep their website up-server, and editorial manuscript formatting. Although there are others that will do nothing to your manuscript than adding their logo and page numbers once you have paid, and they are the one you must beware.

Before you send your manuscript.

1) Read the information for author, note the requirements and publication fee. Check their indexing place such Google Scholar, PubMed (NLM catalog), Crossref, Scopus, etc

2) Check the archive of the journal, see the frequency of their issues and the discipline of their interest.

3) Download one of their recent published work. Check for the ISSN, DOI (click on the doi link to see if it's functional or not), note their referencing style.

Now, you are good to share your discovery to the rest of the world.

Cheers!!!

Toluwase H. Fatoki

A journal not listed in Thomson Reuters list of journals may be a genuine journal or a fake journal. While a journal listed in Thomson Reuters list of journals is a genuine journal.