Predatory or unethical publishing is typically defined as publishers or journals who have employed deceptive or questionable processes to profit from publishing scholarly works. Some of these practices include:
- journal names or website designs that can be confused with established journals
- misleading claims for peer review, indexing, impact factors, or editorial board members
- author fees for editorial and publishing services, such as peer review, without such services being provided
- lack of transparency about policies, location, and staff
- mass e-mails soliciting submission to the journal or invitations to serve on editorial boards
Defining or identifying unethical journals or publishers has involved controversy and complex issues.
- The term predatory has been seen as pejorative by some; other terms used that you may see coupled with publishers and/or journals include:
- deceptive
- dubious
- exploitative
- pseudo-journals
- questionable
- unethical
- Defining which journals are predatory has been a controversial undertaking as well, sometimes involving litigation
- Strategies for identifying unethical publishers have involved blacklists, whitelists, open access publisher association guidelines for inclusion in the association, and evaluation strategies and checklists
- The increasing sophistication of deceptive publishers and the techniques they use means that identifying these publishers cannot be accomplished in one quick, simple step the way you can identify peer-reviewed journals, for example.
- The issues of predatory publishing are complex and touch on many issues of modern scholarly publishing:
- the rising cost of subscription journals
- the proliferation of published works
- the open access movement
- the need for academics to publish to obtain/maintain tenure, and ethical research and publishing
For more information about the issues, please see A quick overview of deceptive publishing issues section.
(from Walden University Library's "Predatory or Unethical Publishing")