Submitted by GAtherton on 28 March 2018
Before the world wide web (WWW) came into being it was easy to tell if a scientific journal was of good quality as they were produced by a relatively small number of specialist and well-known publishers. Since 1975 Journals have been ‘graded’ by ‘Impact factor’, which is an attempt to calculate importance by counting the number of times each paper in a journal has been referred to (‘cited’) by other papers in other journals. It reasons that the more important journal will contain papers that are cited more as more citations = greater interest and importance.
Of course, even in 1975, there were journals that scientists knew were read more than others, and thus were more desirable to publish
Unfortunately, modern publishing is a much more complex industry. Once the WWW made it possible to publish electronic papers very cheaply it undermined the traditional status quo. Just as the established publishers could cut costs by getting rid of paper, so could new publishers and the result has been the rise in open access publishing. There are many benefits to open access publishing for existing publishers but some newcomers have set up a business model which cuts the price of publishing a paper to an absolute minimum and at the same time maximising the numbers of papers they will publish. There is clearly a financial incentive to do this for all sides and for some this model works well, however many scientists say that some new journals have taken costs saving too far.
Getting your research published has always been a competitive process, especially for those journals that carry the most prestige and highest impact factor. Only the very highest quality research gets into Nature (2017 impact factor 40) for example. All papers in traditional journals use peer-review to ensure quality – every paper is sent out to a list of specialists who question its aims, methods, results and conclusions rigorously. However, it has become clear that some of the newer open access journals are either admitting papers that have had very little in the way of peer review or even none at all. Papers are published online in return for fees paid, no matter what the quality. There have been several investigations of the lack of quality in those journals that are quite well known in scientific circles – in one entirely bogus research papers have been sent in and quickly published (for a fee). Now widely referred to as predatory journals with little credibility these journals have blurred the distinction between peer-reviewed information and non-peer-reviewed information. This destabilises understanding of the scientific process in the layperson, eroding public trust – what is the stamp of quality now?
Unless you happen to have a good understanding of the quality of a particular journal it can be difficult to distinguish between good journals and predatory journal, particularly if the subject of the journal is not one that you have great experience of. We still have impact factor listings as a mark of quality which is very useful, though of course, predatory journals will try to suggest that they have a higher impact factor. For that reason, we should always refer to the impact factor listing at Incites Journal Citation Reports. Predatory journals will tend to have low impact factors. There have been attempts to list predatory journals (and here) or to whitelist ‘good’ journals
Why can we not just ban predatory journals? Many of the publishers are sited in countries far away from our control, peer-review is rarely written into an
For further details click here (Wikipedia)
University of Manchester advice on predatory journals and publishers
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