Avoiding deceptive publishers

Recommendations for authors

• Don’t respond to unsolicited invitations to publish
• If you’re not 100% sure the journal is reliable, don’t submit your manuscript there.
• Ask your librarian for help and advice!
• If you’re looking for an OA journal, go to the Directory of Open Access Journals.
• It’s usually safer to publish with institutional publishers (e.g. universities, scholarly societies).
• You don’t have to pay an Article Processing Charge because there are many journals that don’t don’t charge publication fees.
• Good peer review will improve the quality of your paper. Be patient. It’s much better to publish a good paper than to publish quickly without proper checks (and risk retraction). 
• Publish your article as a preprint to establish precedence.

Recommendations for librarians

• Try to understand the mechanisms behind the practice of publishing with disputable journals in your institution.

• Train your users!
• Encourage researchers to forward to you unsolicited emails sent by publishers. This will help you warn the others not to respond to suspicious ones.
• Encourage researchers to use Think. Check. Submit (https://thinkchecksubmit.org/journals/) 
• Check the information provided on the journal’s/publisher’s website, including the legal status, address, web domain (see below).
• Google the journal and check relevant forums to see whether it is mentioned in a negative context.
• While most blacklists of predatory journals are biased and not reliable, the lists of the so-called hijacked journals can be useful (e.g. https://beallslist.net/hijacked-journals/, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ak985WGOgGbJRJbZFanoktAN_UFeExpE/edit#gid=5255084). These are fake journal websites showing the correct information about an existing journal (ISSN, postal address, aims and scope, even the editorial board). However the content is different. The affected journals usually have technically poor websites, are hosted on institutional websites, or are even print-only. The fake journal usually publishes articles that aren’t in line with the aims and scope of the original journal and the content is usually closed, to make it more difficult to discover fraud. As the original (affected) journals are usually indexed in major indexing databases, the easiest way to discover the fraud is to compare the articles titles on the website and in the indexing database.

Useful readings: https://www.zotero.org/groups/5259897/disputable_journals/library

Webinar: Addressing predatory publishing issues

Webinar in French: 

The dynamics of predatory publishing

Think. Check. Submit

Checklists that help authors discover what they need to know when assessing whether or not a journal or a book is a suitable venue for publishing their research: https://thinkchecksubmit.org/

in English, with Arabic subtitles