Dear Ana

Under the extreme care of a teacher a student will never fail. Identification of fake journals is very simple for students also, it may be simply viewed as testing and verification of accuired knowledge of students and how to identify it may be a part of your lesson plan. For eg. even if we are going through a new area, we always have some concepts already acquired by which we can make justification of something, which is also same for students.

Forget about fake journals, i even think (and experienced) that all the reports published in good impact factor and indexed journals can't be taken 100% granted. So, its not all about giving granted things but what, why and how to take it granted.

If student understand to verify/ justify the accuracy of a result (reports), i assume it is almost done.

Best wishes

Chitra

To get our papers accepted in standard journals the quality of the papers should be good. It takes some time in the review process. There is no guarantee that the papers will definitely be accepted.

'Pay and publish' journals are mushrooming because the submitted papers will definitely be published and that too very quickly.

As there is no review system in most of such journals, the quality of the papers published is poor.

We can check their proliferation simply by avoiding them.

Academic restain of some institute (not all but some) is also one of the factor which gives support to such kind of activities, as sure publication in a limited time is not easily feasible for all. It may provide a temorary achievement to one involved but it's almost like commiting a sucide.

But, one thing i observed and strongly beleived is that these will not interfere in the real academic research because they are not preferred to refer by anybody who are real academic researchers, moreover those paid paper even rarely cite similar paid paper.

In my opinion best way to prevention is changing those academic restrain (RR of the institute) which gives direction to such activities.

Regards

Chitra

Yes it is the right time todiscuss this point

Many of such 'pay and publish' journals fail to engage even in any form of reviewing process! Its disheartening how this rubs into the mud, the relevance of scientific research! It is a step in the right direction by some higher institutions such as my own, not to use any papers published in journals that are not peer reviewed and with impacts for promotions and graduations of PhDs. Other institutions should do same to bring sanity into the work of the journals to put to cessation the greedy financial gain set-up journals!

Maybe it’s easy and simple for me and for you to distinguish between real and “fake” publications... my concerns are about students,. I take my students as example: some of them are completel unable to understand this! It’s our role to widespread and creat awareness in this regard. It sounds serious to me...

Dear Ana:

Just tell your students not to publish papers in journals which promises very quick publication in lieu of hefty processing fees.

They can check in the given link too:

https://beallslist.weebly.com/standalone-journals.html

Another concern: uninformed people may use these sources as evidence and reference in their works, what is also unacceptable!

Anyone pursuing original research should verify the published data first and then use them. If your students are inexperienced it is your duty to properly guide them.

Dear Ana

Under the extreme care of a teacher a student will never fail. Identification of fake journals is very simple for students also, it may be simply viewed as testing and verification of accuired knowledge of students and how to identify it may be a part of your lesson plan. For eg. even if we are going through a new area, we always have some concepts already acquired by which we can make justification of something, which is also same for students.

Forget about fake journals, i even think (and experienced) that all the reports published in good impact factor and indexed journals can't be taken 100% granted. So, its not all about giving granted things but what, why and how to take it granted.

If student understand to verify/ justify the accuracy of a result (reports), i assume it is almost done.

Best wishes

Chitra

Indeed, internet facilities opened the market for scientific publications. However, there are many nice articles, many good works that have not found place to be published in good reviews anymore. Why? I guess the Impact Factor and the changes in the rules for ranking reviews have created some distortions. For example, the Journal of Venomous Animals (a Brazilian publication) decided to reduce the number of published articles from 94/year to 70/year. This was guided by Elsevier as a way to improve 'visibility' and 'chances of being cited' and indeed doing this the Impact Factor of the review has arisen. That is, 24 good works per year were 'dismissed' from this good review not because of their poor quality, but because their focus was not 'commercial', had not 'good chances to be cited'. I myself suffered this; in the past, I found a top-review to publish comparative plant anatomy, but since this is not a kind of research that gains many citations, a similar work was refused by the same review. So, if we multiply those examples to all publications already existing, it naturally emerges a good chance for commercial pirate reviews. I don´t want to simply pay for a pirate review to see my work published, but if I find no options, I will prefer this than to keep my data in my personal archive. After all, even in a bad review, there is some chance via internet that my work will be useful for somebody in the world.