How to Identify and Avoid Predatory Journals

Photo by Alice Rosen, via Flickr.

I remember receiving my first “accept” letter for a novel I was working on many years ago. In my excitement, I didn’t stop to think that it was strange that, before the editor began working with me, I would have to pay a large sum of money to get the manuscript into shape. When my euphoria died down and my skepticism shot up, I decided to submit a fake query to the same publisher, highlighting a novel that could never possibly get published. Imagine my dismay when I received the exact same acceptance letter.

So in a way, predatory publishing is not an entirely new concept. And in fact, many more or less legitimate self-publishing options for books, fiction or otherwise, still exist. But with the increasing dominance of the Web and the rise of the open access movement—established to help spread publicly funded research—a more invidious and widely pervasive form of predatory publishing has taken hold in scholarly publishing. And the stakes are far higher. While my novel probably wasn’t going to affect anyone’s life, articles published by unscrupulous publishers—especially medical and nursing literature—have a lot more power to cause damage.

Flawed, unreliable content.

Since predatory journals often forego rigorous […]

2018-01-19T10:56:23-05:00January 19th, 2018|digital health, nursing research, writing|0 Comments
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Message to Authors: Think. Check. Submit.

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Think. Check. Submit.

The above three words sum up the message of a new campaign to increase awareness among researchers and authors about predatory publishers—entities that take advantage of authors by unscrupulous practices that often leave the authors tied up in a contract and owing a large fee to publish in a journal that has little or no standing. (See my related editorial on predatory publishing in the April issue of AJN.)

Promising rapid publication, predatory journals lack peer review and fact-checking, often tout fake metrics, and may adopt names that are deceptively similar to those of established journals. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, has been tracking predatory publishers since 2009 and maintains a list of them on his Web site, Scholarly Open Access.

The Think. Check. Submit. campaign describes itself as an “industry-wide initiative that provides a checklist of quality indicators that can help researchers identify if a journal is a trustworthy.” It’s a new campaign “produced with the support of a coalition from across scholarly communications in response to discussions about deceptive publishing.” In brief, it asks authors to:

THINK about where they should publish their work. Are the journals they are considering reputable?

CHECK the list of questions designed to help determine if a journal is respectable […]

2016-11-21T13:01:57-05:00October 5th, 2015|Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
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Have You Fallen Prey to a Predatory Publisher?

Predatory publishers promise prompt, easy publication. The hidden charges come later, as well as the realization that the journal has no real standing or quality control. Not only is this bad for potential authors, it’s bad for knowledge, flooding the market with inferior information made to superficially resemble the information you need.

Imagine this scenario: You receive an email from a seemingly respectable journal inviting you to submit a paper for publication. You’ve wanted to publish on this topic for some time, and this journal promises you a quick review and publication within a few months. As a new author, you are thrilled . . . that is, until you get charged an outrageous processing fee upon turning the article in. You’ve just fallen victim to a predatory publisher.

Unfortunately, this scenario is becoming all too common. These journals are often difficult to spot, with their professional-looking Web sites and names that sound legitimate, if a little vague. In fact, just recently at AJN, we stumbled across a Web site featuring a journal that looked a lot like ours and had a very similar name. (Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, has been tracking predatory publishers since 2009 and maintains a list of them on his Web site, Scholarly Open Access.)

shawnkennedyIn our April issue, editor-in-chief […]

2016-11-21T13:02:43-05:00April 6th, 2015|career, nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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