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What happens if you publish in a predatory journal?
Publishing an article in a predatory journal affects your reputation as a researcher, and is a waste of your time and effort. Many resources exist on identifying and avoiding predatory publishers. Predatory journals—also called fraudulent, deceptive, or pseudo-journals—are publications that claim to be legitimate scholarly journals, but misrepresent their publishing practices. Publishing in low-tier journals (in case they are not predatory journals) is not bad, however, it is risky. In a low-tier journal, it is less likely for you to receive high-quality reviewer suggestions to improve your manuscript. The company has been criticized for predatory publishing practices. As of 2019, it publishes 430 journals in various fields. SPG uses a Gold open-access model of publishing which charges the authors. The company claims that articles are peer reviewed by scientific experts before publication. Scopus is curated by a Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB), comprised of editorially independent subject experts who are vigilant in identifying and discontinuing journals that are — or have become — predatory or of poor quality.
Why do people publish in predatory journals?
Kurt reported that the reason these individuals published in predatory journals were captured in four themes: social identify threat, unawareness, high pressure and lack of research proficiency. To the best of our knowledge, the resulting database provides the first ever overview of predatory journals in Scopus. In total we found 3 218 predatory journals in Ulrichsweb, of which 281 came from the list of standalone journals and 2 937 from the list of predatory publishers. The study maps the penetration of so-called “predatory” scholarly journals into the citation database Scopus. Predatory journals exploit the author pays open access model, and conduct only cursory or no peer review, despite claims to the contrary. If your paper is published online by a predatory journal, you may write to the office of the predatory journal and ask them to withdraw the paper from their website. Although you are not guaranteed to get a response from a predatory journal, their paper might be taken down from the website. On the other hand, it is clear that Springer, as a publisher, is trying to hide the fact that it is a predatory organization, at least when it comes to Frontiers.
What is the difference between predatory journals and serious journals?
One of the main differences between predatory journals and serious scientific journals is that predatory journals largely do without editorial or quality control measures. Fake journals are the journals which do not perform peer review or minimal language editing in the name of peer review. Unaware of negative consequences of publishing in fake journals, budding or novice academician/clinician/researcher continue to fall prey for them. As mentioned earlier, the vast majority of researchers still believe that getting their papers published in Scopus journals is easy and does not require much effort. More often than not, such people learn the hard way (through repeated rejections) that this is not so. Publishing in a journal can sometimes be challenging or even discouraging. Often, beginners struggle to get published in a good journal even if their work is of good quality because it lacks the finesse and attention to detail that a more experienced researcher’s work has. Sometimes such a judgment can be made on the obvious quality of the manuscript; more often the quality may be high enough, but for one reason or the other it still does not fit the image and the scope of the journal.