Despite countless spoof papers, sting operations and professors turning into detectives for the sake of their research funding (and their inbox), predatory publishers are still going strong. How are they evolving? What fuels demand for their ’services’?
By Claudia Civinini
When Perry Hobson was spammed by a predatory publisher asking to buy the Journal of Vacation Marketing, which he edits, he could have just deleted the emails. Instead, he got creative.
After tracking down the address of the publisher, Professor Hobson, Director of the Academy of Tourism at Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, did his own research. He discovered the company had been registered, de-registered and then re-registered with an almost identical name, and uncovered the name of the director, who turned out to be a launderette owner. With the address, he used Google Street View to identify the property.
The next time they sent him an offer, he replied: ‘Please let the director of your company know I'm fed up with this. And also let them know I don't like the crazy paving that they’ve put down outside.’ “I never heard from them again, funnily enough,” he tells QS Insights Magazine.
Publishing a paper or editing a journal, as in Professor Hobson’s case, can throw out a scent that attracts predatory publishers. Academics’ contact details, included on their papers, are sometimes used to invite them to publish in journals that have little to do with their field but offer an attractive discount on an exorbitant publication fee. They may have someone beg them to contribute a paper to a special issue of a journal to help add legitimacy. Others still could receive an invitation a conference, one of many held in a swanky hotel.
For years, academics and journalists have been pranking predatory journals with spoof papers to expose them as frauds. Some spoofs are quite entertaining, such as one that blamed Pokemon consumption for COVID-19 outbreaks. Others have taken the route of compiling lists of what they deem to be predatory actors.
Despite these efforts, the publish-or-perish culture of higher education, sophisticated and evolving techniques, a lack of training for early career researchers, and confusing regulation differences across regions, have created fertile ground for predatory journals to scam academics and for pseudoscience to find a platform.
journals in Cabell's 'Predatory Reports' database.
growth of Cabell's 'Predatory Report's database anually since 2017.
Growth and evolution of predators
Journal metrics company Cabells International created Predatory Reports to track predatory and deceptive journals. In its history, the list has uncovered a booming business for predatory publishers and conference organisers. “The numbers of predatory journals grow exponentially each year,” says Lacey Earle, Cabells' Chief Executive. “When Cabells launched Predatory Reports in 2017, the database covered 4,000 journals after two years of development.
“As of the beginning of 2023, there are almost 17,000 journals.”
While the increase in Cabells’ list is the outcome of identifying journals that were previously not detected, another cause is the evolving practices within the predatory publishing industry to generate an air of legitimacy. Hijacking reputable journals by copying their website, for example, is becoming commonplace.
The consequence of these tactics is considerable. A survey of 1,859 academics conducted by InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) in 2022, found 14 percent of respondents had used either a predatory journal or a conference. A further 10 percent couldn’t confidently say they hadn’t. Of those that admitted to having used predatory outlets, 84 percent indicated they didn’t know they were predatory at the time.
IAP’s survey also found no correlation between academic stage and engagement with predatory outlets, but did find that researchers in low and middle-income countries were more likely to report they had used a predatory outlet, or not know if they had.
One researcher, who wished to remain anonymous, tells QS Insights Magazine that colleagues in Western Europe don’t want to talk about predatory journals anymore. Still, outlets have many homes, including high and middle-income countries, and papers come from researchers worldwide.
For example, an analysis conducted by the Guardian and published in 2018 found that over 5,000 scientists in British universities had published in predatory outlets. A separate study found the same in Germany. Research conducted in Italy by Manuel Bagues, Mauro Sylos-Labini and Natalia Zinovyeva also found that out of a sample of 46,000 researchers seeking promotion in Italian academia, five percent had published in predatory journals.
journals in Cabell's 'Predatory Reports' database.
growth of Cabell's 'Predatory Report's database anually since 2017.
Reputation damage
Predatory journals can create a variety of victims. While the IAP report found many stumble into a deceptive journal or conference accidentally, new tactics can see an academic promote a predatory journal without any active participation. Dr Susan Hegeman, Professor of English at the University of Florida (UF), was shocked to discover she was supposedly the editor of a predatory journal.
“I received an email from a stranger, another academic… who was quite irate,” she tells QS Insights Magazine. “They alleged… that it was inappropriate for me to formally sponsor this clearly dodgy operation. And of course, I hadn't formally sponsored anything and I was not an editor.”
Dr Hegeman’s credentials were copied from the web and used without her knowledge. It was only after the journal started using UF credentials on their website that the university sent a cease-and-desist letter and the matter was resolved. Dr Hegeman even received an email from the journal editor saying they were sorry to see her go.
But, she says, the experience left her feeling uncomfortable. She was embarrassed to be associated with the journal, but while waiting for the university to take formal legal action, Dr Hegeman decided to talk about her experience on her blog.
“I think public shaming worked in my case,” she says. “And I hope other people consider that as an informal way of policing these kinds of marginal operations.”
While Dr Hegeman’s problem was resolved relatively quickly, other victims of identity fraud are not as fortunate.
Professor James McCrostie, a professor at Daito Bunka University in Japan, observes that once an academic is in that world, it’s difficult to get out. “A former colleague once unknowingly presented at a predatory conference and then had his name attached as an organizer for all subsequent conferences by the company,” he says. “It wasn’t until after I published a newspaper article about the company that his name was removed.”
Beyond engaging in identity theft, predatory journals prey on academics that need to publish, especially those who are inexperienced. After Dr Hegeman published her blog, she was contacted by other academics who were curious about the journal, had questions on how to choose the right publication for their research, or were worried about younger academics being misdirected to inappropriate publications.
At the University of Limerick in Ireland, Professor of International Higher Education and Vice-President Global and Community Relations, Nigel Healey, echoes Dr Hegeman’s experience. “I was at Fiji National University for four years and it was a real problem,” he says. “We had staff desperate to publish their work and many of them resorted to [predatory journals] through ignorance… They even tried to get the publication fees back from the university, because they genuinely didn't realise.”
Dr Hegeman says her experience left reputational damage, and the risks for all researchers is having their names tainted by association, or missing out on career opportunities if hiring committees find out. Another is seeing their research disappear because the journal is not listed on an official index. For some, the experience may even be scarier, such as being asked for exorbitant sums of money after publication under the threat of legal action.
It's a situation that isn’t easily addressed. While inexperienced researchers may be more at risk, anyone can get duped by predatory publishers and conference organisers, but victims of scams are usually too ashamed to speak up.
Professor Hobson has spoken about predatory journals at academic events for some time. Once, when he asked a packed room whether anyone had ever been scammed, no one raised their hand. “But during the coffee break, people then came up to me…what they didn't want to do was to tell everybody that they'd fallen for it.”
"Beyond engaging in identity theft, predatory journals prey on academics that need to publish, especially those who are inexperienced."
Serving a need
As a term, predatory journal, entered popular academic consciousness in 2008, after librarian Jeffrey Beall created a list on his blog to document journals that he deemed did not perform real peer review. While it became an important resource in academia, the list generated some controversy. In 2017, it was shut down, after threats of lawsuits from some of the companies within the list. The term isn’t without critics.
In the same year Beall’s list was discontinued, a paper by Stefan Eriksson and Gert Hegelsson, “Time to stop talking about ‘predatory journals’” argues the term “unhelpfully bundles misconduct and poor quality”. Eriksson reflects on the ‘industrialisation of misconduct” and argues: “Predatory’ does not capture the fact that not all scholars engaging with them are falling prey to these predatory journals and their practices; on the contrary, some scholars willingly engage with them in order to promote their own careers by getting quick additional publications for minimal work.”
A 2019 Nature comment titled “Predatory journals: no definition, no defence”, meanwhile, shows just how complex defining what constitutes predatory publishing can be. The paper warns that reaching an agreement on a definition took leading scholars “12 hours of discussion, 18 questions and three rounds. In particular, the comment included the line: "Part of the group wanted a term that acknowledges that some authors turn to these outlets fully aware of their low quality; these scholars willingly pay to publish in predatory journals to add a line to their CV."
“The pressure to publish is now so intense that you don’t just have to publish the occasional article,” adds Professor Hobson. “When people are coming up for a promotion… then the pressure is on, and some people will try a shortcut at certain points.”
"Many argue that [open access] has, if not opened, at least widened the doors to misconduct".
Professor McCrostie adds that academics who are required to present internationally are sometimes willing to “pay to play”.
“I have seen cases where [academics] have paid to be keynote speakers. But they are willing to do that because then they can put keynote speaker on their CV.
“Very few administrators are checking. Some universities have an internal list of conferences you cannot attend but administrators in general are not really aware of the problem,” he says.
You give open access a bad name
Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West argue in a 2020 paper that while the open access model has numerous advantages, it also means that purchasing decision has been transferred from the hands of expert librarians to “untrained and heterogeneously motivated authors shopping for venues in which to publish single articles.”
No one would question the goodness of the principle of open access, making scientific work available for everyone to read. But many argue that the system has, if not opened, at least widened the doors to misconduct as predatory publishers have found a way to exploit it to make money.
Healey comments: “As funding bodies have pushed academia to publish in open access journals, and they provide funding for [publishing], they are almost legitimising the notion that you pay to be published. I think that's a really unfortunate side effect.”
Madhan Muthu, Director, Global Library at O P Jindal Global University in Sonipat, India, believes that the practice of authors paying money in the name of Article Processing Charges (APC) to journal publishers to make their papers open access (OA) is a negative idea. He also suggests that this author-pay model has contributed to the proliferation of predatory journals.
“Because it is increasingly challenging to distinguish between reputable and predatory open access journals, we should cease supporting author-pay open access journals,” he says. This is the only solution available to safeguard the scientific community from unscrupulous publishers who have emerged globally, according to Muthu.
The DOAJ lists over 12,000 journals with no APCs, over 9,500 of them in English.
Earle at Cabells says that being completely open-access and requiring a fee to publish should not be taken as an indicator of predatory or deceptive behaviour, and that Cabells doesn’t include these elements as criteria in their evaluation for predatory behaviour: “Many completely open-access journals with publication fees have very robust peer review processes and follow industry best practices. Ultimately, the business model and the presence and timing of fees (whether at submission, review or publication) is not a proxy for robustness of peer-review.
One might assume that predatory journals do not float past the confines of university campuses or academia, but without unifed efforts in awareness and quality control, predatory journals can breed dangerous pseudoscientific ideas and severely undermine genuine research - affecting everyone outside the higher education industry.
Tricks of the predatory trade
"Another trick predatory journals are using is lifting entire papers off legitimate journals and republishing them without crediting the source."
By Claudia Civinini
Predatory journals are not just masters of spam mail and creative spelling.
One of the most common tricks they use to deceive prospective authors is in their name, which can be eerily similar to that of a reputable and prestigious organisation.
Hobson recounts that during a conference, he presented the journal one of his colleague edits, flipping two words in its title - as many predatory journals do.
However, his colleague, who was presenting with him, didn’t recognise the mistake at first – and only did so when Hobson revealed the website of the predatory journal..
Hobson recounts the moment with her colleague: “She said: ‘but that's not my website’, and I said: ‘I know it's not, but one word is different and no one in this audience picked up what I said. If you didn't hear it and you are the editor and no one else in the room picked it up, can you imagine a PhD student who's looking to publish? This is being deliberately designed to confuse.”
Another tactic of predators is hijacking journals. Predatory journals clone the website of a reputable journal – or create a website for a journal which has a print-only publication – to deceive prospective authors. It’s not only naïve PhD students or early career researchers that fall for it.
According to research, several articles about COVID-19 that were included in the WHO database in 2021 had been published by hijacked journals. Judging by Cabells data (see table below), this is definitely something predatory journals are doing more and more frequently. Earle says: “In regards to hijacked journals, we have definitely seen their growth increasing exponentially.
Hijacked journals detected and added to Cabell's database per year:
Another trick predatory journals are using is lifting entire papers off legitimate journals and republishing them without crediting the source, creating an archive of good research that hides ulterior motives. In these cases, there can be clues that give it away. For example, when a document containing superscripts is copied, author names and words may appear with an extra character, such as “John Smitha” and “Mary Jonesb”.
McCrostie explains that predatory conference organisers often hide either their for-profit status, their headquarters location or their true ownership, or all three. This makes them hard to pin down and confront.
And of course, the most deceptive trick of the predatory trade is the light or outright fictitious peer review.
While legitimate journals are also trying to offer faster peer review, the timing that some predatory journals offer is “almost impossible”, one source commented. “It’s almost funny how they expose themselves in that sense,” they add.
McCrostie also adds that some predatory conference organisers farm out peer review to other participants. “You apply to join the conference, and then they’ll ask you to read other people’s proposals, which may or may not have anything to do with your field of study,” he explains.
And of course, the most common occurrence is that peer review doesn’t occur at all.