Authors beware! The rise of the predatory publisher

Phishing emails are a mildly irritating, but unavoidable part of our modern communications system. We all use spam filters and have become efficient at deleting the ones that make it through into our inbox. We know that we have not won the ‘Google lottery’, that our bank account will not be deleted unless we click the link and that there are not millions of dollars in the central bank of Nigeria just waiting to be transferred into our own bank account, if only we supply the details. Exploitative business models have therefore had to become more sophisticated. In the sphere of academic publishing, this has given rise to the ‘predatory publisher’, a term coined by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian and researcher at the University of Colorado Denver. 1 Researchers are now inundated with emails from new or unknown open access journals inviting them to submit articles or join Editorial Boards. Some of these are legitimate. But many are not. It is not uncommon to hear from respected researchers that have been duped. Some have agreed to join Editorial Boards and have found their names and affiliations being used to push bad practices. And it can be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to have the name removed. Authors who naively engage the services of these journals often end up paying fees to have an article published. This is common in the open access system; however, these journals do not provide the reviewing, editing and publishing services expected from a reputable academic journal. Predatory publishers often fail to provide adequate peer review; a sting investigation by Bohannon in 2013 highlighted the scale of this problem when 157 open access journals accepted his inherently flawed paper for publication. 2 Without a credible peer review process, the content is simply not trustworthy, so papers that appear in these journals are more likely to tarnish, than enhance, a CV. Furthermore, articles that are ‘published’ are unlikely to appear in legitimate databases such as PubMed, 3 so although they are available on the journal website, they are essentially invisible to fellow researchers. So how did these practices arise, and what is their aim? We are all aware of the explosion in the numbers of academic journals and published papers since the 1950s. 4 This is due in part to the reliance of institutions and funding bodies on using publication data to evaluate researchers when making decisions regarding academic appointments and the awarding of research grants. Research evaluation has become a numbers game, with metrics such as numbers of publications, H-factors and Impact Factors, citations and Altmetric scores used to rank academics, papers and the journals in which they publish. It is a ‘publish or perish’ environment. Aside from the dramatic increase in numbers of papers published, there has also been a transformation in the way science is disseminated, with the digital revolution of the last 20 years allowing instant online publication of unlimited quantities of research. This has led to the rise of the open access movement. Many academics are advocates of this system of publishing, whereby readers and institutions are not charged for access, maximizing research impact and allowing scientific knowledge to be widely distributed and rapidly available. In the gold open access system, non-subscription revenue sources allow research outputs to be made freely available by the publisher without any embargo period. Many traditional journals, including Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology (CEO), now offer authors the option to have their article published open access, for a specific fee. Other publishers choose to be entirely open access and do not charge subscription fees. BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLOS) are two such publishers that have embraced the open access model. Their journals are well-respected peer review publications, often with high Impact Factors and rapid time to publication. Unfortunately this same environment has allowed unscrupulous publishers to flourish. Predatory publishers seek little more than financial gain; taking advantage of the open access business model by exploiting researchers looking for ways to improve their CV's. What are the characteristics of a predatory journal? There are certain things to look for. They often include an aggressive email campaign inviting scholars to submit their papers. 5 They usually include a dubious or non-existent peer review process and publication charges that are only revealed after a paper is accepted. 1 Editorial Board appointments are often made without permission and remain listed on a journal's website despite requests for them to be removed. A recent and disturbing trend has been the mimicking of an established journal's name. 6 Predatory publishers such as this often have falsified or non-existent Impact Factors. 7 As well as looking out for these practices, how do we identify a predatory journal? Since 2010, Jeffrey Beall has published a list of ‘potential, possible or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers’. 8 Beall's List, as it is known, is continually updated, and has rapidly increased in size, from 23 publishers in 2012, and 477 in 2014, to 923 in January 2016, highlighting the scale of the problem. 9 These publishers are often touting many journal titles. Beall also lists more than 900 stand-alone predatory journals and has started to name predatory conferences in his popular blog ‘Scholarly Open Access’, which claims to offer a ‘Critical analysis of scholarly open-access publishing’. 10 In 2012, he added his Criteria for Determining Predatory Open Access Publishers. 11 Critics argue that it is impossible to accurately establish whether a journal meets the criteria, that Beall is too hasty in adding journals to the list and that the criteria used discriminate against newly founded developing world journals. 12, 13 In response, Beall now offers a process whereby a publisher can appeal against their inclusion on the list. Despite the misgivings of some, other reports suggest that Beall's list is widely read and considered a useful resource for librarians and researchers wanting to navigate the pitfalls of open access publishing. 14 An alternative method of assessing the reputability of an open access journal is to see if it appears in the Directory of Open Access Journals. DOAJ membership is only granted to publishers who adhere to their declared ‘Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing’. 15 These best practice guidelines were developed in collaboration with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), and form part of the criteria for assessing membership applications. The size of the problem remains under debate. Beall estimates publications from predatory journals make up 5–10% of all open access articles, whereas others put the figure at just 1%. 14 Regardless, it is a lucrative business. If Beall's list is taken to be accurate, a 2015 study found the market to be worth US 74 m per annum. 16 Academic researchers and reputable publishers who have been frustrated at the growth of this industry will be pleased to learn that the US Federal Trade Commission recently filed a complaint against OMICS group, 17 a predatory publisher which claims to host 3000 annual ‘scholarly’ conferences and operate 700 ‘peer-reviewed’ journals18 including the familiar-sounding Journal of Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology! Time will tell if the complaint is upheld, and if the journals can be shut down. Predator journals defraud authors and damage our reputation and name, but more importantly they allow the scientific literature to be contaminated, thereby risking damaging our collective understanding and treatment of disease. The role of a specialist society peer-reviewed scientific journal such as Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology is to remove poor science, based on false premise and flawed methodology. The responsibility of the RANZCO journal is to curate that portion of the scientific literature that comes our way, with the expertise of the college Fellows as editors and reviewers. In summary, we recommend taking great care if responding to invitations that arrive as emails, particularly from open access journals. It is good practice to establish the credibility of a journal before engaging with them. Check whether they appear on Beall's List, or the DOAJ. Ascertain whether articles published in the journal are indexed in PubMed. Make sure the journal website is transparent regarding publication fees, the Editorial Board and the Editorial Office location and contact details. 19 We are writing this editorial now as there are currently predatory journals soliciting articles from our society members and authors, using our established journal name ‘Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology’ in their spam emails. An examination of one of these emails should quickly establish that it is not from the RANZCO journal. Treat the email as you would a phishing email from a bogus lottery, and consign it to the trash. If in doubt, go to the RANZCO or CEO website and use the contact details that are listed online. To give your research the forum it deserves, make sure that your articles are submitted to the real Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology. Stay safe out there.