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120-543: Akademie Verlag (AV) is a German scientific and academic publishing company , founded in 1946 in the Soviet-occupied eastern part of divided Berlin to facilitate the publication of works by and for the German Academy of Sciences Berlin . Under the communist German Democratic Republic , from 1949 to 1990, it remained closely connected to the academy; unlike other publishing houses, it was not subject to direct control by

240-539: A manuscript to a publisher, is divided into two distinct phases: peer review and production. The process of peer review is organized by the journal editor and is complete when the content of the article, together with any associated images, data, and supplementary material are accepted for publication. The peer review process is increasingly managed online, through the use of proprietary systems, commercial software packages, or open source and free software. A manuscript undergoes one or more rounds of review; after each round,

360-531: A proof reader onto a clean version of the proof. In the early 21st century, this process was streamlined by the introduction of e-annotations in Microsoft Word , Adobe Acrobat , and other programs, but it still remained a time-consuming and error-prone process. The full automation of the proof correction cycles has only become possible with the onset of online collaborative writing platforms, such as Authorea , Google Docs , Overleaf , and various others, where

480-430: A ' preprint ' or ' postprint ' copy of their paper for free download from their personal or institutional website. Some journals, particularly newer ones, are now published in electronic form only . Paper journals are now generally made available in electronic form as well, both to individual subscribers, and to libraries. Almost always these electronic versions are available to subscribers immediately upon publication of

600-608: A 2020 systematic review of 93 lists, only three were assessed as evidence-based. Multiple science funders have taken special measures against predatory publishing, especially in terms of national journal rankings . On 18 September 2018, Zbigniew Błocki, the director of the National Science Centre , the largest agency that funds fundamental research in Poland, stated that if articles financed by NCN funds were published in journals not satisfying standards for peer review, then

720-406: A U.S. lawyer said that the threats seemed to be a "publicity stunt" that was meant to "intimidate". Section 66A has been criticised in an India Today editorial for its potential for misuse in "stifling political dissent, crushing speech and ... enabling bullying". Beall could have been sued for defamation , and would not have been able to fall back on truth as a final defense; under section 66A,

840-662: A binary phenomenon. In the same issue of a journal it is possible to find articles which meet the highest criteria for scientific integrity, and articles which have one or more unethical issues. In March 2008, Gunther Eysenbach , publisher of an early open-access journal, drew attention to what he called " black sheep among open-access publishers and journals" and highlighted in his blog publishers and journals which resorted to excessive spam to attract authors and editors, criticizing in particular Bentham Science Publishers , Dove Medical Press , and Libertas Academica . In July 2008, Richard Poynder's interview series brought attention to

960-712: A blacklist of predatory journals (not publishers) in June, and said that access would be by subscription only. The company had started work on its blacklist criteria in early 2016. In July 2017, both a black list and a white list were offered for subscription on their website. In December 2023, a portal titled "Scholarly Criticism" was launched by a few Malaysian and US based research scholars in response to false and erroneous research published by so-called top-tier business journals. The presented criticism significantly provides evidence of little, no, or nescient peer review conducted by journals' editors and publishers. The portal also provides

1080-472: A copy of their published articles available free for all on the web. Some important results in mathematics have been published only on arXiv . The Journal des sçavans (later spelled Journal des savants ), established by Denis de Sallo , was the earliest academic journal published in Europe. Its content included obituaries of famous men, church history, and legal reports. The first issue appeared as

1200-438: A first tenure-track job, and a published or forthcoming book is now often required before tenure. Some critics complain that this de facto system has emerged without thought to its consequences; they claim that the predictable result is the publication of much shoddy work, as well as unreasonable demands on the already limited research time of young scholars. To make matters worse, the circulation of many humanities journals in

1320-401: A growth in academic publishing in developing countries as they become more advanced in science and technology. Although the large majority of scientific output and academic documents are produced in developed countries, the rate of growth in these countries has stabilized and is much smaller than the growth rate in some of the developing countries. The fastest scientific output growth rate over

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1440-540: A hybrid option, and more are following. The fraction of the authors of a hybrid open access journal that makes use of its open access option can, however, be small. It also remains unclear whether this is practical in fields outside the sciences, where there is much less availability of outside funding. In 2006, several funding agencies , including the Wellcome Trust and several divisions of the Research Councils in

1560-457: A journal. If they publish in a Hybrid open access journal , authors or their funders pay a subscription journal a publication fee to make their individual article open access. The other articles in such hybrid journals are either made available after a delay or remain available only by subscription. Most traditional publishers (including Wiley-Blackwell , Oxford University Press , and Springer Science+Business Media ) have already introduced such

1680-734: A list of questionable journals analyzed by the editors of the portal. The founders of the portal get inspiration from the commentary authored by Ch. Mahmood Anwar titled "Emergence of false realities about the concept of “Silaturrahim”: an academic social construction perspective". The commentary was published in Tourism Critiques back in 2022. In this commentary, the author floated very important concepts of false information reporting, academic social artifacts, academic social construction, false citation chains, and other related concepts. Since Beall's list closed, other list groups have started. These include Kscien's list, which used Beall's list as

1800-420: A merger to form an even bigger company named Springer Nature .) Available data indicate that these companies have profit margins of around 40% making it one of the most profitable industries, especially compared to the smaller publishers, which likely operate with low margins. These factors have contributed to the " serials crisis " – total expenditures on serials increased 7.6% per year from 1986 to 2005, yet

1920-423: A new discovery to be announced as a monograph , reserving priority for the discoverer, but indecipherable for anyone not in on the secret: both Isaac Newton and Leibniz used this approach. However, this method did not work well. Robert K. Merton , a sociologist, found that 92% of cases of simultaneous discovery in the 17th century ended in dispute. The number of disputes dropped to 72% in the 18th century, 59% by

2040-425: A paper is an academic work that is usually published in an academic journal . It contains original research results or reviews existing results. Such a paper, also called an article, will only be considered valid if it undergoes a process of peer review by one or more referees (who are academics in the same field) who check that the content of the paper is suitable for publication in the journal. A paper may undergo

2160-417: A predatory conference, or did not know if they had. The majority of those who did so unknowingly cited a lack of awareness of predatory practices; whereas the majority of those who did so knowingly cited the need to advance their careers." According to one study, 60% of articles published in predatory journals receive no citations over the five-year period following publication. Actors seeking to maintain

2280-454: A publicly disclosed policy on predatory journals. A study in 2015 found that predatory journals rapidly increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 active journals. Early on, publishers with more than 100 journals dominated the market, but since 2012 publishers in the 10–99 journal size category have captured the largest market share. As of 2022, almost one third of

2400-590: A publisher on the list and referenced a resurrected version of Beall's list. This version includes Beall's original list and updates by an anonymous purported "postdoctoral researcher in one of the [E]uropean universities [who has] a hands-on experience with predatory journals." At the May 2017 meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing , Cabell's International, a company that offers scholarly publishing analytics and other scholarly services, announced that it intended to launch

2520-476: A remote service oversees the copy-editing interactions of multiple authors and exposes them as explicit, actionable historic events. At the end of this process, a final version of record is published. From time to time some published journal articles have been retracted for different reasons, including research misconduct. Academic authors cite sources they have used, in order to support their assertions and arguments and to help readers find more information on

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2640-448: A series of reviews, revisions, and re-submissions before finally being accepted or rejected for publication. This process typically takes several months. Next, there is often a delay of many months (or in some fields, over a year) before an accepted manuscript appears. This is particularly true for the most popular journals where the number of accepted articles often outnumbers the space for printing. Due to this, many academics self-archive

2760-552: A set of criteria that publishers and journals must comply with to win a place on a 'white list' indicating that they are trustworthy. Beall has been threatened with a lawsuit by a Canadian publisher which appears on the list. He reports that he has been the subject of online harassment for his work on the subject. His list has been criticized for relying heavily on analysis of publishers' web sites, not engaging directly with publishers, and including newly founded but legitimate journals. Beall has responded to these complaints by posting

2880-441: A starting point, updating it to add and remove publishers. In 2020 Ministry of Science and Technology of China ordered Chinese Center of Scientometrics to launch a blacklist called Chinese Early Warning Journal List (EWJL). EWJL classifies journals into three grades: low, medium or high risk, rather than two (predatory or not) like most other lists. Nevertheless, there is an ongoing criticism of this list as well. According to

3000-411: A third of those journals engaging in fraudulent editorial practices. The root cause of exploitative practices is the author-facing article-processing charge (APC) business model, in which authors are charged to publish rather than to read. Such a model provides incentives for publishers to focus on the quantity of articles published, rather than their quality. APCs have gained increasing popularity in

3120-528: A twelve-page quarto pamphlet on Monday, 5 January 1665, shortly before the first appearance of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society , on 6 March 1665. The publishing of academic journals has started in the 17th century, and expanded greatly in the 19th. At that time, the act of publishing academic inquiry was controversial and widely ridiculed. It was not at all unusual for

3240-558: Is a central concept for most academic publishing; other scholars in a field must find a work sufficiently high in quality for it to merit publication. A secondary benefit of the process is an indirect guard against plagiarism since reviewers are usually familiar with the sources consulted by the author(s). The origins of routine peer review for submissions dates to 1752 when the Royal Society of London took over official responsibility for Philosophical Transactions. However, there were some earlier examples. While journal editors largely agree

3360-474: Is a large industry which generated $ 23.5 billion in revenue in 2011; $ 9.4 billion of that was specifically from the publication of English-language scholarly journals. The overall number of journals contained in the WOS database increased from around 8,500 in 2010 to around 9,400 in 2020, while the number of articles published increased from around 1.1 million in 2010 to 1.8 million in 2020. Most scientific research

3480-434: Is also considered that "Online scientific interaction outside the traditional journal space is becoming more and more important to academic communication". In addition, experts have suggested measures to make the publication process more efficient in disseminating new and important findings by evaluating the worthiness of publication on the basis of the significance and novelty of the research finding. In academic publishing,

3600-418: Is an important aspect in peer review. The evaluation of quality of journals is based also on rejection rate . The best journals have the highest rejection rates (around 90–95%). American Psychological Association journals' rejection rates ranged "from a low of 35 per cent to a high of 85 per cent." The complement is called "acceptance rate". The process of academic publishing, which begins when authors submit

3720-439: Is an outlier in two consecutive years according to any of three criteria comparing it with peer journals in its subject field Web of Science implemented somewhat similar criteria, although they do not specify any quantitative metrics. Also, Web of Science (unlike Scopus) checks for excessive citations of the works authored by the journal board members. As of summer 2024 SciFinder (and Chemical Abstract Service ) do not have

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3840-486: Is as much based on peer reviewing as traditional publishing, the quality should be the same (recognizing that both traditional and open access journals have a range of quality). In several regions, including the Arab world , the majority of university academics prefer open access publishing without author fees, as it promotes equal access to information and enhances scientific advancement, a previously unexplored but crucial topic for

3960-507: Is critically important, humanities publications often take years to write and years more to publish. Unlike the sciences, research is most often an individual process and is seldom supported by large grants. Journals rarely make profits and are typically run by university departments. The following describes the situation in the United States. In many fields, such as literature and history, several published articles are typically required for

4080-652: Is good at spotting publishers with poor quality control." However, the managing director of DOAJ, Lars Bjørnshauge, estimates that questionable publishing probably accounts for fewer than 1% of all author-pays, open-access papers, a proportion far lower than Beall's estimate of 5–10%. Instead of relying on blacklists, Bjørnshauge argues that open-access associations such as the DOAJ and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association should adopt more responsibility for policing publishers: they should lay out

4200-437: Is in many fields of applied science, particularly that of U.S. computer science research. An equally prestigious site of publication within U.S. computer science are some academic conferences . Reasons for this departure include a large number of such conferences, the quick pace of research progress, and computer science professional society support for the distribution and archiving of conference proceedings . Since 2022,

4320-680: Is initially published in scientific journals and considered to be a primary source . Technical reports , for minor research results and engineering and design work (including computer software), round out the primary literature. Secondary sources in the sciences include articles in review journals (which provide a synthesis of research articles on a topic to highlight advances and new lines of research), and books for large projects, broad arguments, or compilations of articles. Tertiary sources might include encyclopedias and similar works intended for broad public consumption or academic libraries. A partial exception to scientific publication practices

4440-634: Is maximised because, quoting the Library of Trinity College Dublin: Open Access is often confused with specific funding models such as Article Processing Charges (APC) being paid by authors or their funders, sometimes misleadingly called "open access model". The reason this term is misleading is due to the existence of many other models, including funding sources listed in the original the Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration : "the foundations and governments that fund research,

4560-911: Is not possible for the OMICS Group to proceed against Beall under section 66A, but it could mount a defamation case. Finally, in August 2016, OMICS was sued for "deceptive business practices related to journal publishing and scientific conferences" by the Federal Trade Commission (a US government agency), who won an initial court ruling in November 2017. Beall's list was used as an authoritative source by South Africa's Department of Higher Education and Training in maintaining its list of accredited journals: articles published in those journals will determine funding levels for their authors; however, journals identified as predatory will be removed from this list. ProQuest

4680-403: Is often transferred from the author to the publisher. In the late 20th century author-produced camera-ready copy has been replaced by electronic formats such as PDF . The author will review and correct proofs at one or more stages in the production process. The proof correction cycle has historically been labour-intensive as handwritten comments by authors and editors are manually transcribed by

4800-665: Is reviewing all journals on Beall's list, and has started removing them from the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences . In January 2017, Beall shut down his blog and removed all its content, citing pressure from his employer. Beall's supervisor wrote a response stating that he did not pressure Beall to discontinue his work, or threaten his employment; and had tried hard to support Beall's academic freedom. In 2017, Ramzi Hakami reported on his own successful attempt to get an intentionally poor paper accepted by

4920-586: The Improbable Research blog had found that Scientific Research Publishing 's journals duplicated papers already published elsewhere; the case was subsequently reported in Nature . In 2010, Cornell University graduate student Phil Davis (editor of the Scholarly Kitchen blog) submitted a manuscript consisting of computer-generated nonsense (using SCIgen ), which was accepted for a fee (but withdrawn by

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5040-512: The APA , CMS , and MLA styles. The American Psychological Association (APA) style is often used in the social sciences . The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) is used in business , communications , economics , and social sciences . The CMS style uses footnotes at the bottom of page to help readers locate the sources. The Modern Language Association (MLA) style is widely used in the humanities . Scientific, technical, and medical ( STM ) literature

5160-756: The Directory of Open Access Journals and complying with a standardised set of conditions. The majority of predatory OA publishers appear to be based in Asia and Africa, but in one study over half of authors publishing in them were found to be from "higher-income or upper-middle-income countries". It has been argued that authors who publish in predatory journals may do so unwittingly without actual unethical perspective, due to concerns that North American and European journals might be prejudiced against scholars from non-Western countries, high publication pressure or lack of research proficiency. Hence predatory publishing also questions

5280-470: The European Union had a larger share of the world's total from 36.6% to 39.3% and from 32.8% to 37.5% of the "top one per cent of highly cited scientific papers". However, the United States' output dropped from 52.3% to 49.4% of the world's total, and its portion of the top one percent dropped from 65.6% to 62.8%. Iran, China, India , Brazil , and South Africa were the only developing countries among

5400-492: The OMICS Group, iMedPub , Conference Series , and the individual Srinubabu Gedela, an Indian national who is president of the companies. In the lawsuit, the defendants are accused of "deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars". The FTC was also responding to pressure to take action against predatory publishers. Attorneys for

5520-405: The humanities is in principle similar to publishing elsewhere in the academy; a range of journals, from general to extremely specialized, are available, and university presses issue many new humanities books every year. The arrival of online publishing opportunities has radically transformed the economics of the field and the shape of the future is controversial. Unlike science, where timeliness

5640-474: The "control" journals which "must meet certain standards of quality, including ethical publishing practices." Among journals sampled from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), 8 of 120 accepted Szust. The DOAJ has since removed some of the affected journals in a 2016 purge. None of the 120 sampled journals listed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) offered Szust the position. The results of

5760-466: The 100 largest publishers (by journal count) could be deemed predatory. The regional distribution of both the publisher's country and authorship is highly skewed, with three-quarters of the authors from Asia or Africa. Authors paid an average fee of US $ 178 each for articles to be published rapidly without review, typically within two to three months of submission. As reported in 2019, some 5% of Italian researchers have published in predatory journals, with

5880-473: The 1990s declined to almost untenable levels, as many libraries cancelled subscriptions, leaving fewer and fewer peer-reviewed outlets for publication; and many humanities professors' first books sell only a few hundred copies, which often does not pay for the cost of their printing. Some scholars have called for a publication subvention of a few thousand dollars to be associated with each graduate student fellowship or new tenure-track hire, in order to alleviate

6000-432: The 2010s, libraries began more aggressive cost cutting with the leverage of open access and open data . Data analysis with open source tools like Unpaywall Journals empowered library systems in reducing their subscription costs by 70% with the cancellation of the big deal with publishers like Elsevier . Several models are being investigated, such as open publication models or adding community-oriented features. It

6120-571: The 31 nations that produced 97.5% of the most cited scientific articles in a study published in 2004. The remaining 162 countries contributed less than 2.5%. The Royal Society in a 2011 report stated that in share of English scientific research papers the United States was first followed by China, the UK, Germany, Japan, France, and Canada. The report predicted that China would overtake the United States sometime before 2020, possibly as early as 2013. China's scientific impact, as measured by other scientists citing

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6240-451: The APC model often charge several thousand dollars. Oxford University Press, with over 300 journals, has fees ranging from £1000-£2500, with discounts of 50% to 100% to authors from developing countries. Wiley Blackwell has 700 journals available, and they charge different amounts for each journal. Springer, with over 2600 journals, charges US$ 3000 or EUR 2200 (excluding VAT). A study found that

6360-697: The ARL found that in "1986, libraries spent 44% of their budgets on books compared with 56% on journals; twelve years later, the ratio had skewed to 28% and 72%." Meanwhile, monographs are increasingly expected for tenure in the humanities. In 2002 the Modern Language Association expressed hope that electronic publishing would solve the issue. In 2009 and 2010, surveys and reports found that libraries faced continuing budget cuts, with one survey in 2009 finding that 36% of UK libraries had their budgets cut by 10% or more, compared to 29% with increased budgets. In

6480-684: The Belgian web portal Cairn.info is open to STM. Publishing in the social sciences is very different in different fields. Some fields, like economics, may have very "hard" or highly quantitative standards for publication, much like the natural sciences. Others, like anthropology or sociology, emphasize field work and reporting on first-hand observation as well as quantitative work. Some social science fields, such as public health or demography , have significant shared interests with professions like law and medicine , and scholars in these fields often also publish in professional magazines . Publishing in

6600-589: The English language, the composition of the editorial board or the rigour of the peer review process itself tend to favour familiar content from the "centre" rather than the "periphery". It is thus important to distinguish between exploitative publishers and journals – whether OA or not – and legitimate OA initiatives with varying standards in digital publishing, but which may improve and disseminate epistemic contents. Lists of journals or publishers deemed either acceptable or unacceptable have been published. Beall's List

6720-868: The FTC won the suit in a summary judgement and was awarded $ 50,130,811 in damages and a broad injunction against OMICS practices. It is unlikely that the FTC will ever collect the award, since the rulings of US courts are not enforceable in India, and since OMICS does not have property in the US. Recognizing common characteristics of predatory publishers can help to avoid them. Complaints that are associated with predatory open-access publishing include: Predatory publishers have also been compared to vanity presses . In 2015, Jeffrey Beall used 26 criteria related to poor journal standards and practices, 9 related to journal editors and staff members, 7 related to ethics and integrity, 6 related to

6840-600: The Foundations to issue their own lists of acceptable journals; (2) making sure that the results of their funded works are readily discovered by other people, as Web of Science and Scopus are subscribed to by most reputable institutions. However, in parallel with the withdrawal of Clarivate from Russia in 2022 and the pause in Elsevier services from 2022 onwards, the Web of Science and Scopus listings are no longer considered as essential by

6960-922: The GDR ministry of culture. Still, it was regarded with suspicion in the West due to communist influence. Most of the output was sold in East Germany and the Eastern Bloc . Since 1957, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , the founder of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1700, and „theoria cum praxi“ are used as symbols. Since the 1970s, several volumes of the Nicolaus Copernicus Gesamtausgabe (complete edition) have been published by Akademie Verlag, covering many documents from and about Nicolaus Copernicus in detail. Astronomische Nachrichten (Astronomical Notes), one of

7080-509: The Middle East." The demonstration of unethical practices in the OA publishing industry has also attracted considerable media attention. In 2013, John Bohannon , a staff writer for the journal Science and for popular science publications, tested the open-access system by submitting to a number of such journals a deeply flawed paper on the purported effect of a lichen constituent, and published

7200-421: The OMICS Group published a response on their website, claiming "your FTC allegations are baseless. Further we understand that FTC working towards favoring some subscription based journals publishers who are earring [ sic ] Billions of dollars rom [ sic ] scientists literature", suggesting that corporations in the scientific publishing business were behind the allegations. In March 2019,

7320-627: The Russian agencies. More transparent peer review, such as open peer review and post-publication peer review , has been advocated to combat predatory journals. Others have argued instead that the discussion on predatory journals should not be turned "into a debate over the shortcomings of peer review—it is nothing of the sort. It is about fraud, deception, and irresponsibility..." In an effort to "set apart legitimate journals and publishers from non-legitimate ones", principles of transparency and best practice have been identified and issued collectively by

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7440-662: The UK announced the availability of extra funding to their grantees for such open access journal publication fees. In May 2016, the Council for the European Union agreed that from 2020 all scientific publications as a result of publicly funded research must be freely available. It also must be able to optimally reuse research data. To achieve that, the data must be made accessible, unless there are well-founded reasons for not doing so, for example, intellectual property rights or security or privacy issues. In recent decades there has been

7560-454: The apparent crisis has to do with the combined pressure of budget cuts at universities and increased costs for journals (the serials crisis ). The university budget cuts have reduced library budgets and reduced subsidies to university-affiliated publishers. The humanities have been particularly affected by the pressure on university publishers, which are less able to publish monographs when libraries can not afford to purchase them. For example,

7680-522: The articles to open and accessible datasets, and (perhaps most importantly) arranging and managing scholarly peer review. The latter is a task that should not be underestimated as it effectively entails coercing busy people into giving their time to improve someone else's work and maintain the quality of the literature. Not to mention the standard management processes for large enterprises, including infrastructure, people, security, and marketing. All of these factors contribute in one way or another to maintaining

7800-460: The author(s) of the article modify their submission in line with the reviewers' comments; this process is repeated until the editor is satisfied and the work is accepted . The production process, controlled by a production editor or publisher, then takes an article through copy editing , typesetting , inclusion in a specific issue of a journal, and then printing and online publication. Academic copy editing seeks to ensure that an article conforms to

7920-404: The author). Predatory publishers have been reported to hold submissions hostage, refusing to allow them to be withdrawn and thereby preventing submission in another journal. Predatory publishing does not refer to a homogeneous category of practices. The name itself was coined by American librarian Jeffrey Beall who created a list of "deceptive and fraudulent" Open Access (OA) publishers, which

8040-438: The authors' personal judgement, rather than objective evidence. Lists of acceptable sources, on the other hand, have been criticized as not being relevant to how academics evaluate journals. Directory of Open Access Journals is an example of a free whitelist. Other lists of pre-approved journals are available from large research funders. University of Colorado Denver librarian and researcher Jeffrey Beall , who coined

8160-621: The average APC (ensuring open access) was between $ 1,418 and US$ 2,727. The online distribution of individual articles and academic journals then takes place without charge to readers and libraries. Most open access journals remove all the financial, technical, and legal barriers Archived 2021-05-06 at the Wayback Machine that limit access to academic materials to paying customers. The Public Library of Science and BioMed Central are prominent examples of this model. Fee-based open access publishing has been criticized on quality grounds, as

8280-439: The commercial publishers raised the subscription prices significantly, they lost little of the market, due to the inelastic demand for these journals. Although there are over 2,000 publishers, five for-profit companies ( Reed Elsevier , Springer Science+Business Media , Wiley-Blackwell , Taylor & Francis , and SAGE ) accounted for 50% of articles published in 2013. (Since 2013, Springer Science+Business Media has undergone

8400-575: The criteria he uses to generate the list, as well as instituting an anonymous three-person review body to which publishers can appeal to be removed from the list. For example, a 2010 re-evaluation resulted in some journals being removed from Beall's list. In 2013, the OMICS Publishing Group threatened to sue Beall for $ 1 billion for his "ridiculous, baseless, [and] impertinent" inclusion of them on his list, which "smacks of literal unprofessionalism and arrogance". An unedited sentence from

8520-406: The criteria, "but the more points on the list that apply to the journal at hand, the more sceptical you should be." The full list is quoted below: Scholar Aamir Raoof Memon proposed the following criteria of predatory publishing: Many scientific abstract and citation databases implemented policies to identify and combat predatory journals. For example, Scopus automatically flags a journal that

8640-485: The desire to maximize publishing fees could cause some journals to relax the standard of peer review. Although, similar desire is also present in the subscription model, where publishers increase numbers or published articles in order to justify raising their fees. It may be criticized on financial grounds as well because the necessary publication or subscription fees have proven to be higher than originally expected. Open access advocates generally reply that because open access

8760-461: The dramatic increase in opportunities to publish results online has led to a decline in the use of peer-reviewed articles. An academic paper typically belongs to some particular category such as: Note: Law review is the generic term for a journal of legal scholarship in the United States , often operating by rules radically different from those for most other academic journals. Peer review

8880-500: The editor of Philosophical Transaction's 1796 rejection of Edward Jenner 's report of the first vaccination against smallpox . "Confirmatory bias" is the unconscious tendency to accept reports which support the reviewer's views and to downplay those which do not. Experimental studies show the problem exists in peer reviewing. There are various types of peer review feedback that may be given prior to publication, including but not limited to: The possibility of rejections of papers

9000-399: The enormity of OMICS's editorial practices". OMICS' lawyers stated that damages were being pursued under section 66A of India's Information Technology Act, 2000 , which makes it illegal to use a computer to publish "any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character" or to publish false information. The letter stated that three years in prison was a possible penalty, although

9120-528: The experiment were published in Nature in March 2017, and widely presented in the press. SCIgen , a computer program that randomly generates academic computer science papers using context-free grammar , has generated papers that have been accepted by a number of predatory journals as well as predatory conferences . On 25 August 2016, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit against

9240-412: The field itself becomes more specialized. Along with the variation in review and publication procedures, the kinds of publications that are accepted as contributions to knowledge or research differ greatly among fields and subfields. In the sciences, the desire for statistically significant results leads to publication bias . Academic publishing is undergoing major changes as it makes the transition from

9360-486: The field of library and information science , even top tier non-OA journals could be qualified as predatory. Similarly, another study reported on the difficulties of demarcating predatory and non-predatory journals in biomedicine . One librarian wrote that Beall's list "attempts a binary division of this complex gold rush: the good and the bad. Yet many of the criteria used are either impossible to quantify..., or can be found to apply as often to established OA journals as to

9480-506: The financial pressure on journals. Under Open Access, the content can be freely accessed and reused by anyone in the world using an Internet connection. The terminology going back to Budapest Open Access Initiative , Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities , and Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing . The impact of the work available as Open Access

9600-467: The first international journals in the field of astronomy, founded in 1821, was published by Akademie Verlag for several decades as well as Physica Status Solidi , founded in 1961. After the fall of the Berlin Wall , the employees rejected their boss and elected one of themselves as successor. As it had managed to build enough of a reputation in the West, several offers were made for Akademie Verlag, and

9720-408: The geopolitical and commercial context of scholarly knowledge production. Nigerian researchers, for example, publish in predatory journals due to the pressure to publish internationally while having little to no access to Western international journals, or due to the often higher APCs practiced by mainstream OA journals. More generally, the criteria adopted by high JIF journals, including the quality of

9840-619: The grant numbers would have to be removed from the publications and funds would have to be returned to the NCN. Both the Russian Science Foundation and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research require their grant recipients to publish only in the journals included into either Web of Science or Scopus databases. This policy aims at (1) preventing the researchers from falling into the traps of predatory publishers, without having

9960-436: The humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences digitally available for the first time. Academic publishing Most established academic disciplines have their own journals and other outlets for publication, although many academic journals are somewhat interdisciplinary , and publish work from several distinct fields or subfields. There is also a tendency for existing journals to divide into specialized sections as

10080-403: The journal is poor quality or even fraudulent but publish in them anyway. New scholars from developing countries are said to be especially at risk of being misled by predatory publishers. A 2022 report found that "nearly a quarter of the respondents from 112 countries, and across all disciplines and career stages, indicated that they had either published in a predatory journal, participated in

10200-418: The journal's house style , that all of the referencing and labelling is correct, and that the text is consistent and legible; often this work involves substantive editing and negotiating with the authors. Because the work of academic copy editors can overlap with that of authors' editors , editors employed by journal publishers often refer to themselves as "manuscript editors". During this process, copyright

10320-575: The last two decades as a business model for OA, due to the guaranteed revenue streams they offer, as well as a lack of competitive pricing within the OA market, which allows vendors full control over how much they choose to charge. Ultimately, quality control relies on good editorial policies and their enforcement, and the conflict between rigorous scholarship and profit can be successfully managed by selecting which articles are published purely based on (peer-reviewed) methodological quality. Most OA publishers ensure their quality by registering their titles in

10440-460: The last two decades has been in the Middle East and Asia with Iran leading with an 11-fold increase followed by the Republic of Korea, Turkey, Cyprus, China, and Oman. In comparison, the only G8 countries in top 20 ranking with fastest performance improvement are, Italy which stands at tenth and Canada at 13th globally. By 2004, it was noted that the output of scientific papers originating from

10560-496: The latter half of the 19th century, and 33% by the first half of the 20th century. The decline in contested claims for priority in research discoveries can be credited to the increasing acceptance of the publication of papers in modern academic journals, with estimates suggesting that around 50 million journal articles have been published since the first appearance of the Philosophical Transactions . The Royal Society

10680-456: The letter read: "Let us at the outset warn you that this is a very perilous journey for you and you will be completely exposing yourself to serious legal implications including criminal cases lunched [ sic ] against you in INDIA and USA." Beall responded that the letter was "poorly written and personally threatening" and expressed his opinion that the letter "is an attempt to detract from

10800-514: The natural scientific branch of Akademie Verlag was moved to Wiley-VCH , while the humanities section, including its name and logo, was transferred on 1 October 1997 to R. Oldenbourg Verlag , which in 2004 was acquired by Cornelsen Verlag . In 2013, Walter de Gruyter acquired Akademie and Oldenbourg from Cornelsen. The publisher Walter De Gruyter is digitizing the archive of the Akademie Verlag. By 2025, this will make more than 15,000 works from

10920-437: The new German states (including Berlin) sold it on 3 January 1991 to VCH Verlagsgruppe Weinheim . As a result, of the 170 employees in 1991, only 40 remained until the 50th anniversary in 1996. The rather broad range of publications was reduced to focus on philosophy, history, political and cultural sciences, history of art, literature, and lingual sciences plus mathematics and physics. When John Wiley & Sons took over VCH,

11040-511: The new entrants in this area... Some of the criteria seem to make First World assumptions that aren't valid worldwide." Beall differed with these opinions and wrote a letter of rebuttal in mid-2015. Following the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? investigation, the DOAJ has tightened up its inclusion criteria, with the purpose of serving as a whitelist , very much like Beall's has been a blacklist . The investigation found that "the results show that Beall

11160-489: The number of serials purchased increased an average of only 1.9% per year. Unlike most industries, in academic publishing the two most important inputs are provided "virtually free of charge". These are the articles and the peer review process. Publishers argue that they add value to the publishing process through support to the peer review group, including stipends, as well as through typesetting, printing, and web publishing. Investment analysts, however, have been skeptical of

11280-552: The objection that "(w)hether it's fair to classify all these journals and publishers as 'predatory' is an open question—several shades of gray may be distinguishable." Beall's analyses have been called sweeping generalizations with no supporting evidence, and he has also been criticized for being biased against open-access journals from less economically developed countries. A 2018 study has shown that Beall's criteria of "predatory" publishing were in no way limited to OA publishers and that, applying them to both OA and non-OA journals in

11400-737: The other hand, they also list journals with subpar standards of peer review and linguistic correction. Studies using Beall's list, or his definitions, report an exponential growth in predatory journals since 2010. A 2020 study has found hundreds of scientists say they have reviewed papers for journals termed 'predatory' — although they might not know it. An analysis of the Publons has found that it hosts at least 6,000 records of reviews for more than 1,000 predatory journals. "The researchers who review most for these titles tend to be young, inexperienced and affiliated with institutions in low-income nations in Africa and

11520-403: The paper version, or even before; sometimes they are also made available to non-subscribers, either immediately (by open access journals ) or after an embargo of anywhere from two to twenty-four months or more, in order to protect against loss of subscriptions. Journals having this delayed availability are sometimes called delayed open access journals . Ellison in 2011 reported that in economics

11640-498: The practices of new publishers who were "better able to exploit the opportunities of the new environment." Doubts about honesty and scams in a subset of open-access journals continued to be raised in 2009. Concerns for spamming practices from these journals prompted leading open-access publishers to create the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association in 2008. In another early precedent, in 2009

11760-452: The print to the electronic format. Business models are different in the electronic environment. Since the early 1990s, licensing of electronic resources , particularly journals, has been very common. An important trend, particularly with respect to journals in the sciences, is open access via the Internet. In open access publishing, a journal article is made available free for all on the web by

11880-505: The published papers the next year, is smaller although also increasing. Developing countries continue to find ways to improve their share, given research budget constraints and limited resources. There is increasing frustration amongst OA advocates, with what is perceived as resistance to change on the part of many of the established academic publishers. Publishers are often accused of capturing and monetising publicly funded research, using free academic labour for peer review, and then selling

12000-434: The publisher at the time of publication. Both open and closed journals are sometimes funded by the author paying an article processing charge , thereby shifting some fees from the reader to the researcher or their funder. Many open or closed journals fund their operations without such fees and others use them in predatory publishing . The Internet has facilitated open access self-archiving , in which authors themselves make

12120-425: The publisher's business practices, and 6 'other' general criteria related to publishers. He also listed 26 additional practices, which were 'reflective of poor journal standards' which were not necessarily indicative of predatory behaviour. In 2016, researchers Stefan Eriksson and Gert Helgesson identified 25 signs of predatory publishing. They warn that a journal will not necessarily be predatory if they meet one of

12240-519: The region's higher education. It has also been argued that good science done by academic institutions who cannot afford to pay for open access might not get published at all, but most open access journals permit the waiver of the fee for financial hardship or authors in underdeveloped countries . In any case, all authors have the option of self-archiving their articles in their institutional repositories or disciplinary repositories in order to make them open access , whether or not they publish them in

12360-501: The resulting publications back to academia at inflated profits. Such frustrations sometimes spill over into hyperbole, of which "publishers add no value" is one of the most common examples. However, scholarly publishing is not a simple process, and publishers do add value to scholarly communication as it is currently designed. Kent Anderson maintains a list of things that journal publishers do which currently contains 102 items and has yet to be formally contested from anyone who challenges

12480-532: The results in a paper called, " Who's Afraid of Peer Review? ". About 60% of those journals, including journals of Elsevier , SAGE , Wolters Kluwer (through its subsidiary Medknow ), and several universities, accepted the faked medical paper. PLOS ONE and Hindawi rejected it. In 2015, four researchers created a fictitious sub-par scientist named Anna O. Szust ( oszust is Polish for "fraudster"), and applied on her behalf for an editor position to 360 scholarly journals. Szust's qualifications were dismal for

12600-508: The role of an editor; she had never published a single article and had no editorial experience. The books and book chapters listed on her CV were made-up, as were the publishing houses that published the books. One-third of the journals to which Szust applied were sampled from Beall's List of predatory journals. Forty of these predatory journals accepted Szust as editor without any background vetting and often within days or even hours. By comparison, she received minimal to no positive response from

12720-400: The scholarly ecosystem have sought to minimize the influence of predatory publishing through the use of blacklists such as Beall's List and Cabell's blacklist , as well as through whitelists such as the Directory of Open Access Journals . Nevertheless, identifying (and even providing a quantitative definition) of predatory journals remains difficult, because it is a spectrum rather than

12840-517: The scholarly record. Predatory publishing Predatory publishing , also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing , is an exploitative academic publishing business model, where the journal or publisher prioritizes self-interest at the expense of scholarship. It is characterized by misleading information, deviates from the standard peer-review process, is highly non-transparent, and often utilizes aggressive solicitation practices. The phenomenon of "open-access predatory publishers"

12960-472: The subject. It also gives credit to authors whose work they use and helps avoid plagiarism . The topic of dual publication (also known as self-plagiarism) has been addressed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), as well as in the research literature itself. Each scholarly journal uses a specific format for citations (also known as references). Among the most common formats used in research papers are

13080-468: The system is essential to quality control in terms of rejecting poor quality work, there have been examples of important results that are turned down by one journal before being taken to others. Rena Steinzor wrote: Perhaps the most widely recognized failing of peer review is its inability to ensure the identification of high-quality work. The list of important scientific papers that were initially rejected by peer-reviewed journals goes back at least as far as

13200-491: The term "predatory publishing", first published his list of predatory publishers in 2010. Beall's list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers attempted to identify scholarly open-access publishers with questionable practices. In 2013, Nature reported that Beall's list and web site were "widely read by librarians, researchers, and open-access advocates, many of whom applaud his efforts to reveal shady publishing practices." Others have raised

13320-456: The truth of any information is irrelevant if it is grossly offensive. In an unrelated case in 2015, Section 66A was struck down by the Supreme Court of India , which found that it had no proximate connection to public order, "arbitrarily, excessively and disproportionately invades the right of free speech", and that the description of offences is "open-ended, undefined and vague." As such, it

13440-553: The universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves". For more recent open public discussion of open access funding models, see Flexible membership funding model for Open Access publishing with no author-facing charges . Prestige journals using

13560-415: The value added by for-profit publishers, as exemplified by a 2005 Deutsche Bank analysis which stated that "we believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process... We are simply observing that if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." A crisis in academic publishing is "widely perceived";

13680-468: The value of publishers. Many items on the list could be argued to be of value primarily to the publishers themselves, e.g. "Make money and remain a constant in the system of scholarly output". However, others provide direct value to researchers and research in steering the academic literature. This includes arbitrating disputes (e.g. over ethics, authorship), stewarding the scholarly record, copy-editing, proofreading, type-setting, styling of materials, linking

13800-428: The western monopoly of science-publishing, "by August 2021, at least 210,000 new papers on covid-19 had been published, according to a Royal Society study. Of the 720,000-odd authors of these papers, nearly 270,000 were from the US, the UK, Italy or Spain." In the 1960s and 1970s, commercial publishers began to selectively acquire "top-quality" journals that were previously published by nonprofit academic societies. When

13920-401: Was an example of a free blacklist, and Cabells' Predatory Reports is an example of a paid blacklist database. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) recommends against blindly trusting any list of fake or predatory journals, especially if they do not publish the criteria by which journals are evaluated. Some lists of purported predatory publishers have been criticized for being based on

14040-494: Was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall around 2012, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship . Predatory publishers are so regarded because scholars are tricked into publishing with them, although some authors may be aware that

14160-541: Was not until the middle of the 20th century that peer review became the standard. The COVID-19 pandemic hijacked the entire world of basic and clinical science, with unprecedented shifts in funding priorities worldwide and a boom in medical publishing, accompanied by an unprecedented increase in the number of publications. Preprints servers become much popular during the pandemic, the Covid situation has an impact also on traditional peer-review . The pandemic has also deepened

14280-462: Was steadfast in its not-yet-popular belief that science could only move forward through a transparent and open exchange of ideas backed by experimental evidence. Early scientific journals embraced several models: some were run by a single individual who exerted editorial control over the contents, often simply publishing extracts from colleagues' letters, while others employed a group decision-making process, more closely aligned to modern peer review. It

14400-498: Was used as reference until withdrawn in 2017. The term has been reused since for a new for-profit database by Cabell's International . On the one hand, Beall's list as well as Cabell's International database do include truly fraudulent and deceptive OA publishers that pretend to provide services (in particular quality peer review) which they do not implement, show fictive editorial boards and/or ISSN numbers, use dubious marketing and spamming techniques, or even hijacking known titles. On

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