Multiple daily solicitations.

The screenshot below shows an excerpt from an email our editor-in-chief recently received. Editors at AJN receive multiple emails daily from mysterious publishers soliciting them for article submissions, important roles on editorial boards, or as conference speakers. If it weren’t alarming, it would be flattering. We’re not scholars and experts in sub-specialties of botany or engineering, in fossil fuel geology, neurosurgery, or, for that matter, microbiology. Our advice on such topics might well be dangerous, or at least irrelevant and wrong.

Some open access journals are highly respected in their fields; the journal that sent this letter also bills itself as open access, but if it contains legitimate articles on microbiology, and I’m not saying it doesn’t, they may find themselves with strange bedfellows.

Despite obvious warning signs, some authors are not deterred.

It’s impossible to keep ahead of the flood of such emails, most of which are characterized by typographical oddities and peculiar juxtapositions of tone. There are many other tell-tale signs of predatory publishers, most of which have little or no oversight from real content experts and no editing or filtering of content (one must simply pay a fee to be published or attend a conference).

But what’s most worrisome about this trend is that their strategy of casting a very wide net seems to snare at least a few fish. Anecdotes keep cropping up from people who know people who did actually publish in that journal with a name that sounds almost like that of a respected journal in the same subject area, did actually speak at the conference at which only five people, from totally different subject areas, showed up to speak. Maybe they didn’t know that it wasn’t the absolutely best place to publish . . .

When authors cite predatory journal articles.

We’ve begun to receive submissions in which authors cite data from articles published by such journals, many of which never publish more than one issue and have no identifiable editor. (In such cases, if the article has already been accepted because it’s otherwise sound, we request the authors find new sources to support their points.)

An overview and some tips.

Those who spend less time in the journal publishing world may be fortunate enough to be less familiar with these journals and conferences, which sometimes seem to be overtaking the publishing world like Kudzu. So we’re resharing an article from a couple of years back that provides a helpful overview of this phenomenon. No doubt it will continue to take new forms.

“Predatory Journals: Alerting Nurses to Potentially Unreliable Content” (free until March 15).