Are you publishing your research in a questionable open access journal? Presented by Leena Shah, Ambassador for DOAJ, India Webinar at OpenCon 2016 @ Ranchi, India 12th Nov 2016               This entire work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

What is Questionable or Predatory OA Publishing? 'PREDATORY' OPEN ACCESS Coined by Jeffrey Beall "The sort of publishers and journals who aims to collect article processing fee, but lack rigorous peer review and proper marking practices" Jeffrey Beall, Associate Professor and Scholarly Initiatives Librarian, Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver, USA

Why does predatory publishing flourish? A steady rise of Gold* OA journals increasing due to innovation in digital technologies, librarian and publishers support: Easy to exploit the Gold OA publishing by charging authors a processing fee and offering no peer review for their article in exchange The gold (author pays) open-access model has given rise to a great many new online publishers. Many of these publishers are corrupt and exist only to make money off the author processing charges that are billed to authors upon acceptance of their scientific manuscripts." *Author-Pay model Poltronieri et. al., (2016)

How do questionable publishers operate? Victim selection & Intensive e-mail marketing Researcher submits article along with Article Processing charges and/or submission fees Publisher may accept and publish flawed manuscripts with little or no peer review Article is available online on a Hijacked or ‘fake’ journal website Questionable Publishers May accept flawed manuscripts in terms of scientific and/or scholarly quality

Outcome of questionable publishing practices Questionable OA publishing Production of low-quality research published in a primary source of information i.e. journals Undermines OA model and risk for inexperienced authors These unethical practices have led to negative publicity to OA publishing in general For the researcher: Your research may be published alongside other sub-standard work Withdrawal of article may be charged or may not be allowed if you have transferred copyright /publishing rights

Why do researchers fall prey to unethical OA publishing practices? Desire (and need) to Publish (or perish) Short publishing time Early career researchers Lack of awareness Lack of skill & knowledge to detect unethical OA publishing

Learn to detect unethical OA publishing practices Some common practices by questionable publishers are: Inappropriate marketing practices Unsolicited spam emails Advertise a very quick publishing time Advertise a relative low publication fees Journal titles does not match its origin e.g. “International”, “American” or “European” Fake impact factors. Check Journal Citation Reports to confirm. No or little quality control of contents Low-standard peer review process or even don’t have peer review at all

Learn to detect unethical OA publishing practices Journal website does not identify a formal editorial board with their affiliations Information regarding article processing charges may be hidden or missing from the website ‘Contact Us’ has a web form and does not reveal location Publisher publishes journals that combine 2 or more disciplines not normally treated together

Tools to help detect unethical OA publishing practices DOAJ http://doaj.org Think, Check, Submit http://thinkchecksubmit.org Beall’s list https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

References Shen, C. (2016). Questionable Open Access Publishing [Power Point Slides]. Presented online for Latin America as DOAJ Ambassador for China. Tin, L., Ivana, B., Biljana, B., Ljubica, I. B., Dragan, M., & Dušan, S. (2014). Predatory and fake scientific journals/publishers–a global outbreak with rising trend: a review. Geographica Pannonica, 18(3), 69-81. Beall, J. (2015, January 1). Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers. Retrieved November 10, 2016, from https://scholarlyoa.com/ Shen, C., & Björk, B. C. (2015). ‘Predatory’open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics. BMC medicine, 13(1), 1. Ward, S. M. (2016). The rise of predatory publishing: How to avoid being scammed. Weed Science, 64(4), 772-778.

DOAJ Ambassador for India Thank you! Leena Shah DOAJ Ambassador for India leena@doaj.org