Tips for spotting ‘predatory’ journals

"• Bad ones are often listed on Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers. Good ones are often on the Directory of Open Access Journals. Both are online, but neither is definitive. • Look at their websites. The predators use poor English and have shadowy contact information — often just a gmail account in a generic name like “editor@.” The editor-in-chief’s name is misspelled. • Archives are brief. These journals come and go — bad news for a researcher who hopes to leave a paper online permanently. • The website has prominent instructions about how to send money to a bank in India, China or Nigeria. • You submit an article and it passes peer review in a day. The website then falsifies the submission date to hide this. • Authors must do their own layout. • A journal lists an office in Canada and you ask to come in and meet the editors, but the answer is a firm No."