How to avoid being duped by predatory journals

There are tens of thousands of academic journals, with new ones appearing all the time, creating a complicated landscape of many potential homes for every article. “Unfortunately, because it’s so big and confusing, predatory journals have taken advantage of this system,” says Dominic Mitchell, operations manager at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and current chair of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, a trade association of open access journal and book publishers.

“A predatory publication is one that is deceptive in some way; where the publishers are not transparent about what they’re doing,” explains Katherine Stephan, research support librarian at Liverpool John Moores University.

In 2019 a US court ordered OMICS Publishing Group to pay $50.1m to the Federal Trade Commission for misleading researchers.1 The court found that OMICS engaged in numerous deceptive practices. Often authors were not told about publishing fees until after their articles were accepted. Those who then asked for their articles to be withdrawn were frequently refused.

And this is just the tip of an iceberg of bad publishing practices. Keeping track of the deception is difficult—partly because there is no hard line between what’s considered predatory and what’s not. But publishing experts are trying to make sense of it and help researchers make informed choices.