Predatory journals
The idea of paid open access has begun to be parasitized by dishonest publishers, whose main goal is to generate profit. The basic feature of predatory journals is the absence of a classic review procedure, the emphasis is mainly on the payment of a publication fee. The danger of publishing in such journals lies in the threat to the professional reputation of the author and his workplace.
The basic instructions for verifying the trustworthiness of a journal are provided on the I know where I publish page, or the original version of Think. Check. Submit.
To avoid publishing your article in a predatory journal, you can follow the standards of transparency and good practice of scientific publishing set by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), or the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
Intermediate criteria for finding a suitable journal for publication include:
- unambiguous determination of royalties and their amount
- true statements of citation metrics
- length and quality of the review procedure declared in a journal
- declaring the OA regime in a journal, including the DOAJ indexing
- availability of articles and available archive of the journal
- the possibility of verifying the members of the editorial board of the journal
- true contact details for the publisher and the seat of the journal
- the name and graphics of the journal do not imitate, for example, a more prestigious journal
- information about the ISSN on the pages of the journal, which can be checked in the ROAD database
- compliance of the included fields and topics in the content profile of the journal
- positive references from colleagues or the scientific community
Useful tips
PLCH, Lukáš a Jiří KRATOCHVÍL. Pochybné časopisy [online]. 15. dubna 2019. Dostupné z: https://kuk.muni.cz/vyuka/materialy/predatori/
OVIEDO-GARCÍA, M Ángeles. Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI). Research Evaluation. 2021, 30(3), 405–419. Dostupné z: https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvab030.