Fake editorial board members and a broad scope. Please note that a journal in its early stage might not be indexed. Some journals also charge fees for hard copies of their journals and that does not make them predatory. A clear way of identifying a predatory journal is by identifying fake attributes, that is, fake editorial board, fake organization, fake indexing information, and fake research.

The companies publishing predatory journals are an emerging problem in the area of scientific literature as they only seek to drain money from authors without providing any customer service for the authors or their readership. These predatory journals try to attract new submissions by aggressive email advertising and high acceptance rates. But in turn, they do not provide proper peer review, and therefore, the scientific quality of submitted articles is questionable. This is important because more and more people, including patients, are reading such journals and rely on the information they provide. Consequently, predatory journals are a serious threat to the integrity of medical science, and it is crucial for scientists, physicians and even patients to be aware of this problem. In this review, we briefly summarize the history of the open access movement, as well as the rise of and roles played by predatory journals. In conclusion, young and inexperienced authors publishing in a predatory journal must be aware of the damage of their reputation, of inadequate peer review processes and that unprofitable journals might get closed and all published articles in that journal might be lost.

Best Regards Panagiotis Paliogiannis

Among the most defining characteristics are:

(a) all encompassing research areas,

(b) fake non-significant researchers on the editorial board; some real names who are victims themselves,

(c) High pressure invitation email, rife with errors,

(d) flashy, unprofessional websites,

(e) fake or no peer-review,

(f) unrealistic turn around time between submission and publication,

(g) fees that are affordable but charging process through a third party,

(h) editors who are not variable researchers,

(i) vulnerable young researchers are dis-proportionally targeted,

(j) No credible indexing,

(k) Inflated but erroneous impact factors advertised,

(l) author instructions non-existent or ambiguous....

Fake editorial board members and a broad scope. Please note that a journal in its early stage might not be indexed. Some journals also charge fees for hard copies of their journals and that does not make them predatory. A clear way of identifying a predatory journal is by identifying fake attributes, that is, fake editorial board, fake organization, fake indexing information, and fake research.

Dear Panagiotis Paliogiannis

Please have a look at this useful link.

Article Potential predatory and legitimate biomedical journals: Can ...

Regards

Thank you for your comments and suggestions.

I found out a Journal Evaluation Tool created at the Loyola Marymount University to help authors distinguish between predatory and not-predatory journals (https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/librarian_pubs/40/). It indeed contains most of your suggestions. One of the criteria included in this tool seems a little strange to me: the number of the articles which should be greater than 10. Nevertheless, as Dr. Ademolawa Michael Adedipe said in his comment, a journal in its early stage might not be indexed and have only a small number of articles. I think we should be careful to judge and apply all the criteria included in the tool, which seems really interesting to me. Other authors consider a further essential criterion, not included in the LMU tool: the lack of article retraction policy. What do you think about it?

Please check the criteria given by COPE as well as by Jeffrey Beall.

You can find in the INASP/moodle web page other articles about predatory journals.

There is another situation that can be considered as predatory: somebody take the place of the edithor as a hacker and send a letter to the author telling him that his article has been approved and charging fees to publish the article.

Dear Panos,

I just would like to provide a suggestion to potential authors who are going to submit their work

Based on the list below, which has been made by a librarian and not by a scientist many respectable journals with high Impact Factor or publishers (e.g. Frontiers) are considered predatory

https://beallslist.weebly.com/

I believe that a scientist is able to recognize by himself/herself a predatory journal without the need of librarian who probably has never performed science

Many thanks dear Gianfranco.

You are welcome Ciro Manzo

Dear Gianfranco, you’re right, expert scientists are able to identify predatory journals. Nevertheless, young researchers might not be enough experienced to do so. Moreover, some well-established journals adopt some strange policies. For example, there are well known journals which publish hundreds of highly priced papers a year. Sometimes, the amount of the publishing fee grows with the impact factor of the journal, but when you look at the quality of the papers you find numerous papers without any originality, along with interesting papers and also high quality papers. When an article is rejected, often they suggest another journal of the same publishing house. I am not sure they are doing it for the good of science. In any case, I don’t think these aspects were considered when the Beall’s list was drawn up, and of course these journals cannot be considered as "predatory", at least for the moment.

You are right Panagiotis Paliogiannis

Dear Panagiotis

you know that in non-predatory journals (Lancet, NEJM...), some published research findings are false, as Ioannidis highlighted in 2005.

Do you think that young researchers have enough experience about this topic ?

Dear Ciro Manzo, I think Ioannidis was right in his provocative article. In addition, we all know that more than 95% of the research published is not directly useful in clinical practice (the so called "lost in translation" phenomenon); probably all of us have contributed in this 95%.. perhaps young research are not aware of this, but the issue goes beyond the scope of my question and I think it is really complex to analyze it here. In any case, predatory journals can only worsen the situation, because they amplify the "lost in translation" effect and the amount of false research findings.

Dear Salvatore, it depends on the predator :-)) One of the most frequent characteristics of common predatory journals is the low amount of the publishing fees (less than 150 $ in accordance to Shamseer et al. 2017), which is affordable by most young researches, at least in developed countries. Bigger predators want more.. Consider that sometimes the charges for publication are omitted; after the authors sign away the copyright, they are asked to pay fees as hight as 1800 $ or more. I can imagine it would be a real disaster for a young researcher..

Dear Panagiotis Paliogiannis , I agree with Salvatore Sotgia :-)

Dear Panagiotis Paliogiannis,

the issue goes beyond the scope of your question. I agree.

The topic is very complex, but the so-called lost in translation phenomenon is only one of the problems highlighted by Ioannidis ( and confirmed by others).

Another problem is that several non predatory journals publish articles proposed by some investigators ( friendly....) that are inappropriate ed useless from a methodological point of view.

Several young researchers have difficulties to publish in these journals and can look with interest toward so called predatory journals, some of these have an IF or are present in Medline or Embase....

Salvatore Sotgia and Gianfranco Pintus wrote useful thinkings.

Their point of view is totally right.

The most important test is — indexed in relevant database, transparancy in peer-review, and legitimate editorial board.

You may add one more ominous characteristic: predatory publishers may require payment to remove an "accepted" publication. Being an editor of a scientific journal, I recently rejected a submission from a country in Asia because our referee identified the paper already on WWW. Upon informing the authors, they explained that they had indeed sent their paper to this "publisher." However, they had become suspicious since it took only 48 hours for acceptance, so they had checked and realized their mistake. However, the "publisher" had demanded $1500 as a "retraction fee," and the authors' assert that they have attempted to credit the sum to a supplied bank account number but without success. Upon checking the website of the "publisher," an address is shown but on google maps a private home in a small suburban town area in western Ontario, Canada pops up. Maybe the address is fake or that "publishers" may be creative teenagers with some skills in Wordpress that run profitable businesses in homes without any parental awareness?

I feel genuinely sorry for the authors/hostages, but (the legal advisors working for) my publisher have little sympathy so we will not republish anything. It is also a bit of a contradiction that something on WWW can "disappear" by a few clicks on a computer because of all web robots continually monitoring the web.

The moral of this narrative is that instead of trying to remember all the items to consider upon selecting a journal and publisher, one needs to strictly follow the pieces of advice of the Think-Check-Submit initiative (https://thinkchecksubmit.org/).