Predatory Publishing

In predatory publishing quality assurance (peer review, indexing, etc.) and editorial processing of articles often do not take place or do not meet the standards of good scientific practice.

Predatory publishing can frequently be found in the field of Open Access (OA) publishing. The concept of Open Access is misused, and you are charged the usual APCs (Article Processing Charges) for OA publishing, without any corresponding services being provided: your article will not be reviewed or insufficiently reviewed, not be edited or insufficiently edited, not be indexed or insufficiently indexed in the usual subject databases, usually not be made permanently available to the public and will be lost sooner or later. Since your rights of use have often already been transferred to the predatory publisher upon payment of the APCs, sometimes even at submission stage, you can no longer publish your article elsewhere.

As a scientist, you are the primary victim of the Predatory Journals. Not only do you lose the money you have spent on publication, you also finance a publication format that deprives you of the chance of a clearly visible scientific publication. At the same time, your scientific reputation will be permanently damaged once your name has been associated with a Predatory Journal.

It should be noted that the scientific quality of an article does not depend on the journal in which it is published. The quality can only be assessed at the level of the individual publication. An article is therefore not automatically unscientific or "fake science" if it has appeared in a Predatory Journal.
Nevertheless, your article may not meet the necessary quality criteria for good scientific work due to insufficient or missing peer review in Predatory Journals. If the journal is not considered scientifically reliable, your contribution loses its significance, becomes irrelevant and cannot be quoted. Since articles published in Predatory Journals are not available on a long-term basis, the verifiability of your scientific work cannot be guaranteed. For young scientists in particular this traceability is of great importance for their careers. Since almost no Predatory Journal is indexed in the large citation databases such as the Web of Science or Scopus, the visibility of your research results in these journals is also severely restricted.

Finally, as an author in a Predatory Journal, you unintentionally become a supporter of these abusive business practices. Your university's reputation is also at risk, as repeated publishing in Predatory Journals by members of a university is seen as a result of a lack of research performance by its academic staff and a lack of quality assurance by the university.

The following indicators may but do not have to be signs that a journal is a Predatory Journal. If the criteria listed below occur cumulatively, you should definitely check whether you are dealing with a trustworthy publication organ.

• Journal is not indexed in one of the known citation databases like the Web of Science or Scopus. Since Predatory Journals are hardly to be found here, this is one of the fastest ways to check the reliability of an unknown journal.
• Aggressive marketing. An established scientific journal does not need this. Therefore be careful when receiving advertising emails from new, unknown OA magazines.
• Sometimes Predatory Journals imitate the style and names of established journals to deceive researchers.
• Publisher cannot be identified: the publisher's name is unknown, contact data is not available or inconsistent and contact by telephone, mail and email is not possible.
• You are not familiar with the journal, you have never read any articles from it before. If you are a junior researcher, you should contact more experienced colleagues if in doubt.
• Editors / members of the journal's editorial board are unknown. You may even be invited to act as an editor yourself.
• If the names of respected scientists and scholars are listed as members of the Editorial Board, they usually have not been asked (doublecheck whether the activity for the journal is also mentioned on the person's own webpage).
• Use of own, partly fictitious citation metrics or false information of known metrics, e.g. Journal Impact Factor seems too high.
• The journal's online presence is diffuse: tables of contents are poor or missing, and current articles in alleged OA journals are difficult to find or to download.
• Authors' guidelines are not defined, there is no information on the peer review.
• There is no concrete information on costs. In the case of OA magazines, the APCs (Article Processing Charges) are mostly hidden.
• Information on the indexing of the journal in research and citation databases is missing.
• The journal is not indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
• The publisher is not a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).
• The publisher is not a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Similar precautions can be taken to avoid scam conferences. There are now a large number of providers of supposedly scientific conferences that are also aggressively marketed via spam emails.

After paying your participation fee, you will hear nothing more from the organizer or merely that the conference is taking place on a much smaller scale than announced or only virtually. Your participation fee will not be refunded. Your submission for the proceedings will be published without editorial work and has the same disadvantages as a publication in a Predatory Journal.

Therefore, please be careful when receiving invitations to conferences. You should be familiar with the conference organizers and chairs. The conference should be organized either by a professional association known to you or in close cooperation with such an association.