Fake science and predatory publishers

The internet made it possible to publish scientific findings easily and inexpensively for a large audience. This has led to the emergence of electronic journals based on the open access model alongside traditional subscription-based journals. These journals are often backed by a university or a society that wants to offer its members alternative publication options. Commercial publishers have also positioned themselves here and offer either both versions or exclusively open access journals. In addition, predatory publishers have also discovered business models in this area by charging a lot of money for little service. They are often very aggressive with advertising and approach potential authors flatteringly by email. The promised short publication time of a few days or weeks (which of course can only be kept due to the lack of peer review) also has a positive effect. Sometimes these publishers also use similar names to well-known journals in the field, which can easily lead to confusion. Their websites often look reputable, contain fictitious impact factors and alleged listings in reputable specialist databases, so that the journals cannot be recognized as predatory journals at first glance.

This results in problems for the authors publishing there, whose publications are at best published on the Internet, but only under poor conditions, such as: poor licenses (no Creative Commons licenses), no indexing in reputable databases (such as Web of Science or Scopus), no archiving solutions and often high prices (which have to be paid by the author upon publication).

DOAJ, the Directory of Open Access Journals, helps to distinguish trustworthy journals from predatory journals. Journals that are included here must fulfill a whole range of quality criteria. Nevertheless, there are of course also high-quality journals outside the DOAJ. Scientists are asked to check for themselves whether a journal is suitable for their purposes. The website: thinkchecksubmit.org provides assistance with this. Finally, it should not be forgotten that the boundaries between less high-quality journals and genuine predatory journals are fluid. There is a lot of dynamism in this area and publishers formerly classified as predatory publishers have now become respected open access publishers whose journals can keep up with established journals in terms of quality.

Of course, every scientist is free to decide in which journal he or she wants to publish. And of course there are also reasons why you might want to publish an article in a journal of lower quality. And if you do this for a good reason and are aware of the implications, there is nothing to be said against it.

Predatory journals also pose problems for the readers of scientific publications. Although these are not listed in reputable specialist databases, they can be found via Google or Google Scholar. As these articles have not been peer-reviewed or not sufficiently peer-reviewed, quality assurance is left to the individual reader. This is also exploited by people whose tendentious "scientific" articles are not accepted by reputable journals. As a result, these journals are also a playground for pseudo-science and conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, not all articles in this area are fake science.

Fake science and predatory publishers - recognize and avoid by Silke Frank is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.