This Opinion highlights the impacts of predatory journals on research reliability, suggesting a new accreditation system. It emphasizes the importance of quality in scientific communication.
Scientific publishing faces a credibility crisis driven to a very large extent by predatory journals, paper mills, and exploitative open-access (OA) practices. Structural pressures—publish-or-perish culture, mandatory OA policies, and author publication charges (APC)-driven business models—fuel the proliferation of low-quality or fraudulent research, now exacerbated by artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content. This Opinion, which aligns with a growing clamour from the research community—calls for an international journal accreditation system, guided by a transparent code of conduct and enforced by funding agencies, to restore integrity, prioritize quality over quantity for professional progression, and safeguard trust in scientific communication.
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Lorenzo et al. (2025) studied this question.
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