how to avoid the publication trap

predatory open access publishers

Damien Belvèze

damien.belveze@univ-rennes.fr

Université de Rennes

2025-03-28

• Data management support for researchers
• training sessions (data management, identifiers, reproducibility)
• Data management plans
• Data curation on ‘Recherche Data Gouv’ repository

Introduction to ARDOISE, the briton Research Data Hub, and the collective’s set of services

ARDoISE datahub

outline

1. Predators and Imposters
2. The definition challenge
3. How can we recognize predatory practices in publishers offers?
4. why some researchers willingly used journals considered as predatory?
5. The grey zone
6. The compass to publish

1. predators and imposters

In 2023, Erik Ertgstrom, Elsevier’s CEO, earned 16,5 M euros

Elsevier has built up a war chest with $1.17 billion in net revenues, representing a 38% increase in sales. Researchers depend on these publishing companies for the quality assessment of their work. as a raw material, they yield for nothing the product of their public funded research, with which those companies will make extravagant profits by siphoning off university libraries’ finances. Or they will require research teams to pay 2 or 3 thousand dollars for so-called article processing charges in order to make their publication open access in their journals. In most of the cases, big publishing companies will make profit from both publication costs and subscriptions sold at a premium to libraries ( hybrid journals)

Elsevier, Springer, Nature, all predate public money by forcing scholars and their institutions to pay massive amounts of money to publish their papers, while the real added value, peer review process is massively done by researchers for free. They are predators, but not impersonators : in majority the papers that are submitted to these stakeholders are reviewed according to scientific standards.

about Erik Ergstrom see Relx group Annual Remuneration Report

2. The definition challenge

Figure 1: A Universalist concept?

There is an intense and ongoing worldwide debate on the definition of POAP, whether a journal should be qualified as POAP when it ensures only a poor level of peer-reviewing but helps researchers who cannot afford to pay $4000 fees to publish in Gold OA journals owned by Springer, Wiley, McMillan, and others. We will discuss this later.

Additionally, some journals that were initially considered POAP have increased their quality standards and gained credit and legitimacy among researchers.

Moreover, when researchers sometimes agree on a definition to qualify these journals, they often disagree on the criteria one should use to determine if a given journal should be classified as a predatory open-access publisher or not.

a light definition

Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices

:notebook: Grudniewicz et al. (2019)

a perversion of the Gold Road open Access

Figure 2: Gold vs Green

The DOAJ specifies wether APC for a given journal will be paid, and the amount of this APC

POAP parasite open access, exploit the crystal-clear philosophy of open access

Rise of APC model = rise of predatory open access publishers

Figure 3

The growth of predatory open access publishers is linked to the devopment of open access itself and particularly the Gold road with publication fees. The Gold road does not mean that authors will have to pay [[APC]], but those predators we have mentioned above have made people understand that it was usually the case.

A new market emerged and with it a new genre of crooks.

3. How can we recognize predatory practices in publishers offers?

Dear wonderfull author, you’re doing an awsome job!

if the page is not properly displayed within this Quarto presentation, send the following URL to attendants : https://damienbelveze.github.io/predatory_OA/predatory_letter.html

non-transparent peer review

• very short review times : how can it be possible if the peer-review process is taken seriously

• average duration of the peer review process (sept 2023):

  • MDPI = 35 days
  • Taylor & Francis, Springer, Frontiers : 78 to 122 days

• MDPI CEO says they have recruited an army of secretaries to help the job being done quickly

Is MDPI too fast or the others too slow in their PR management?

Even legitimate publishers have a year-on-year tendency to put pressure on reviewers to reduce peer review times in order to increase the pace of publications and raise the rate of remuneration for shareholders

Predatory : non transparent or lacking information on APC

acceptance rate and retraction rate

• Acceptance rate : MDPI > 41-50% of all submitted articles are accepted / others > 15-20%

• Retraction rate : MDPI > 213 papers cited in the retraction database (but comparable retraction rates among better-regarded publishers)

:notebook: Kratochvíl et al. (2020)

self-citations

Figure 4: is self-citation level a relevant criterium?

MDPI performs a bit higher than WOS average of self-citations to journals but not so much (> grey zone)

POAP mimick existing journals and metrics

false indexation in bibliographic databases: POAP mimick the standard metrics and use misleading metrics

:notebook: Delgado (2016)

journal hijacking

the term was coined in 2012 by an iranian researcher, Mehrdad Jalalian :notebook: Abalkina (2023)

usurpation of the graphic identity of a reputable journal by a journal that wants to attract either readers or authors (as in the case of Predatory open access publishers)

this does not happen only to academic journals but also to media outlets as well (see ABC news, which impersonates the brand and mimicks ABC, the famous American News media’s graphical identity.

in case this quiz would not work in the presentation, you may play it online

in case this quiz would not work in the presentation, you may play it online

Quiz one

• option 1 : 10.1016/j.ypmed.2024.107937
  
• option 2 : 10.36648/2572-5483.6.11.121

Quiz two

• option 1 : https://sylwan-journal.pl/apex/f?p=SYLWAN:WSKAZOWKI
  
• option 2 : http://www.sylwan.ibles.org/guide.html

4. why some researchers willingly used journals considered as predatory?

Figure 5: the dark side of publication

Why some researchers consciously publish their results in predatory journals

• Young Global South researchers think they are not enough experienced or equiped to publish in traditional journals :notebook: Boukacem-Zeghmouri et al. (2023)
• Predatory open access publishers publish whatever you submit, so they make it possible to publish negative data
• APC are far cheaper than in traditional journals
• In some countries, PhD students need to publish their paper before their defense (race against the clock)
• The quantity of publications is still too often considered at the expense of their quality (publish or perish). Academia still favors quantity over quality.

By “equiped”, we mean that researchers are poorer than their colleagues from their western counterparts, and they have more teaching charges and less time to lead research projects, they also lack of administrative support, and cannot rely on uptodate training on data management and use of research software :

Many countries, especially low income countries, have limited access to the infrastructure needed to conduct research such as intermittent electricity supplies, poor technical infrastructure (such as internet connectivity and technical support), sub-standard research training, lack of expert data management support, lack of access to the published literature, and to the latest research software (Bezuidenhout et al., 2017). Low level connectivity issues effectively limit access even where material is ostensibly open (Shanahan & Bezuidenhout, 2022). Researchers are also time poor, because of the pressure to teach and limited administrative support. As a result of these issues, researchers may lack confidence in the quality of their work and trust in international systems of communication and research assessment, which typically do not account for such obstacles and the inequity in resources available to different research groups (Leonelli 2018)

:notebook: Group et al. (2024)

Why it is still a bad idea

• a publication in a predatory open access journal can be considered as a spot in your career
• you may have real difficulties to recover rights on your submitted paper (republication)
• the public money you gave to these scam journals should have been spent in a rigorous peer reviewing process
• predatory open access publishers raise the level of distrust towards science among the public

considering this, a lot of universities (mainly from Global North), when they can prove that a publication was consciously made in a predatory journal impose sanctions against the researchers who made the publication.

black list / white list

Figure 6: Jeffrey Beall, author of the first POAP blacklist

black list

• Beall’s list (closed, biased (subjective, anti-OA, pro Big Publishing Companies, individual = subject to intimidation)
• Commercial offers : not updated, incomplete, non transparent and too expansive

white list (DOAJ, COPE, WOS, Scopus etc.)

it’s better to educate Academia where to publish rather than where to not publish, but no whitelist makes consensus so far. These lists are

• not always affordable (WoS, Scopus)
• not enough updated (WoS index also lists too many proven POAP and contributes to legitimate them) See for instance :notebook: Abalkina (2024)
• incomplete (a lot of quality publishers) have not yet applied to be listed into DOAJ
• not enough geopoliticaly sensitive :notebook: Kulczycki (2023)

5. The grey zone

Figure 7

POAP a concept that protects the dominant positions of the big publishing companies ?

What the concept of predatory journals actually reveals is the deep inequalities between the scientific working conditions in countries close to the “centre” of global science, such as the UK and US, and those on its periphery

:notebook: Partnership (2022)

see also Reggie Raju on LCP blog: > I believe that the greatest negative impact of the list and its lingering vestiges is the psychological damage – this is a major hammer blow to researchers from the global south who are eager to become net contributors to the world’s knowledge production

:notebook: Raju (2018)

See also : as a consequence, some papers published in POAP are “often cited because they are the sole data sources on various semi-peripheral countries and their contexts” Partnership (2022)

the publication quality spectrum

Low quality OA journals = predatory OA journals?

Figure 8: it’s not a black and white question

inflation of special issues

inflation of special issues: - more opportunities to publish for scholars under pressure (publish or perish) - more opportunities for publishers to gain money through APC - peer-review standards reduced

:notebook: Hanson et al. (2023)

Figure 9: the strain on scientific publishing

6. The compass to publish

Figure 10

Compass to publish

• helps you to ask the good questions about a journal (-> weighted diagnostic)
• maintained by the University of Liege
• available in english

Try C2P

• Polish Journal of Science
• American Journal of Advanced Drug Delivery

previous tests on AJADD

figures

figure	source et crédits
?@fig-elsevier_profit	Research Professional News
Figure 1	Shark, by yosuke muroya, CC-by-nc
Figure 2	Perrin, S. (2022, novembre 30). Beware predatory publishers!
Figure 3	Perrin, S. (2022, novembre 30). Beware predatory publishers!
Figure 4	Sarka Erben Johansson’s presentation on MDPI at the MUNI University 5/09/2023
Figure 7	source: Anonymous on Twitter based on Illustration by David Parkins
Figure 8	The InterAcademy Partnership. (2022). Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences—Full report.
Figure 9	Ansede, M. (2023, octobre 31). Public funds being swallowed up by scientific journals with dubious articles.
Figure 5	Author, A. (2022, juillet 9). Five reasons to publish in a predatory journal. Publishing with Integrity.
Figure 6	Author, A. (2020, septembre 28). What is Beall’s List? Why was it shut down? Predatory Journals and Conferences.

content reused

The predatory letter activity is an english translation of the activity that was originaly designed by Olivier Poirier (UQTR), Valérie Levasseur (UQAC), Félix de la Durantaye (ENAP) and Valérie Bourdeau (UQ) (source).

software used for this presentation

Most part of the software used for this presentation are “libre” software

• Quarto 1.3.450
• VScode 1.8.0
• Rstudio 2023.03.0
• H5p
• Digitale’s H5P editor (logiquiz) and board (digiboard)

Références

Abalkina, A. (2023). Predatory vs hijacked journals: A commentary to “A ‘Trojan horse’ in the reference lists: Citations to a hijacked journal in SSCI-indexed marketing journals.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 102798. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102798

Abalkina, A. (2024). Journal hijackers still infiltrate Scopus despite its efforts. In Retraction Watch.

Boukacem-Zeghmouri, C., Pergola, L., & Castaneda, H. (2023). Profiles, motives and experiences of authors publishing in predatory journals: OMICS as a case study. https://hal.science/hal-04130294

Delgado, A. (2016). Fraudulent and false metric indexes. A scam for publishers and authors. Comunicar. School of Authors. https://www.revistacomunicar.com/wp/school-of-authors/fraudulent-and-false-metric-indexes-a-scam-for-publishers-and-authors/

Group, C. D. E. W., Anand, S., Bezuidenhout, L., Cox, A., John-Langba, J., & Leonelli, S. (2024). POLICY BRIEF: Data Ethics and Structural Inequities in Science. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10933602

Grudniewicz, A., Moher, D., Cobey, K. D., Bryson, G. L., Cukier, S., Allen, K., Ardern, C., Balcom, L., Barros, T., Berger, M., Ciro, J. B., Cugusi, L., Donaldson, M. R., Egger, M., Graham, I. D., Hodgkinson, M., Khan, K. M., Mabizela, M., Manca, A., … Lalu, M. M. (2019). Predatory journals: No definition, no defence. Nature, 576(7786, 7786), 210–212. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03759-y

Hanson, M., Gómez Barreiro, P., Crosetto, P., & Brockington, D. (2023). The strain on scientific publishing (figures) (pp. 33343265 Bytes). [object Object]. https://doi.org/10.6084/M9.FIGSHARE.24203790

Kratochvíl, J., Plch, L., Sebera, M., & Koriťáková, E. (2020). Evaluation of untrustworthy journals: Transition from formal criteria to a complex view. Learned Publishing, 33(3), 308–322. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1299

Kulczycki, E. (2023, April 4). We won’t defeat predatory journals by making a list of them. Times Higher Education (THE). https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/we-wont-defeat-predatory-journals-making-list-them

Partnership, T. I. (2022). Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences - full report. InterAcademy Partnership (IAP). https://www.interacademies.org/sites/default/files/2022-03/1.%20Full%20report%20-%20English%20FINAL.pdf

Raju, R. (2018, February 7). Predatory publishing from a global south perspective. LPC blog. https://librarypublishing.org/predatory-publishing-global-south-perspective/