Predatory Journals and Conferences Guide

More on Predatory Journals

​Predatory journals have taken advantage of the surge in open access (OA). They take advantage of the publishing model in order to make money. It is important to point out that open access and predatory journals are two completely different things, but that the latter couldn't exist without the former.

Traditional locked journals are funded through subscriptions. OA journals are available for all readers without any subscription fees being paid. Their funding model is based on charging to publish instead of read. Authors pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) that varies from journal to journal. Some charge a few hundred Euros, others many thousand.  The median cost to publish an open access article in Europe was €1957 in 2023. This is nothing suspicious about this - it's how OA publishing works. What predatory journals do is to charge authors without doing any of the peer review and other editorial services that they have promised. They also usually charge less than real publishers, which makes it tempting to choose they cheaper option.

Where do predatory journals come from?

Anyone can start what appears to be an academic journal. It’s easy to procure an ISSN (journal identification number) and make a homepage. Predatory journals use the fact that academics are under pressure to publish and limited by budget constraints. They make it quick, cheap and easy to get published. But as predatory journals are solely interested in making a profit they simply publish the articles they get sent without any peer review or editing – or don’t publish them at all.

Some predatory journals use a tactic known as hijacking. This is when they either take over a legitimate journal and let the quality plunge as they keep raking in APCs, or create a fake homepage for a real journal through which they charge authors who believe they are publishing in the real thing. An example of this is the journal Jökull that has been hijacked by an imposter using the same title and ISSN. You can still find their evil twin online, and this is the first result in a Google search for the journal. Read more in the article Hijacked journals: what they are and how to avoid them from January 2019.

A known predatory publisher

OMICS is a publisher that has long been accused of dubious practices. In March 2019 the company was sentenced to pay $50.1 million in damages for deceptive practices. The judge wrote “Defendants did not participate in an isolated, discrete incident of deceptive publishing, but rather sustained and continuous conduct over the course of years.”

OMICS publish around 700 journals in different scientific fields. They advertise robust peer review and editorial services, but have in many cases been shown to approve manuscripts for publication in a very short time and without any substantial feedback to authors. 69,000 manuscripts were presented as evidence, and OMICS could only prove that half of them had been through any kind of peer review at all.

Another way in which OMICS has misled researchers is by claiming to have a high “impact factor”, but using an in-house system to measure this impact. Some of the OMICS journals also claim to be indexed in PubMed and Medline even when they aren’t.

OMICS also arrange academic conferences. These also show evidence of predatory practices. A random sample of 100 conferences showed that 60% of all those listed as organisers or participants never had agreed to it.

Read more about the OMICS verdict in Science Magazine (who helped provide some of the evidence) and Retraction Watch.