Caveat Researcher: Open Access Spawns ‘Predatory Journals’ - IEEE Spectrum

"Every ecosystem breeds parasites and predators. The Open Access Publishing movement, a high-minded effort to break high-priced journals’ copyrighted death grip on scientific information, is no exception. The ranks of Open Access are growing. These journals –many of them good and a few excellent—make peer-reviewed papers available to all comers without subscription fees. Usually, they charge the authors to publish, rather than charge the readers to read. Below the idealistic surface, though, lurks a new breed of opportunists out for profit alone. More and more, scientific researchers are being duped into submitting papers to journals that boast comfortingly austere names and noble Open Access mission statements, but exist mainly to charge authors exorbitant fees to publish articles that may never be cited or even read, as recent investigations—by Declan Butler in Nature and then Gina Kolata in the New York Times—have revealed.  In 'The Dark Side of Publishing,' one of several articles in a special Nature issue on the future of scientific information distribution, Butler recounted the story of University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall. About five years ago, Beall started seeing a spate of solicitations—much of them indistinguishable from spam—from sketchy-looking new journals.  These publications have plausibly dry and academic names, aggressively solicit both manuscripts and editorial board candidates, and promote their Open Access commitment. What they conceal, though, is low readership and high author fees.  In some cases, researchers have submitted articles to journals whose titles are almost the same as established journals, only to be whip-sawed by a rapid acceptance (yay!) followed immediately by author-fee bills that may run thousands of dollars (what?!).  To combat this trend, Beall created Scholarly Open Access, In addition to blog reports on specific journals and events, Scholarly Open Access maintains lists of 'potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals' and publishers. I’ve added the italics: it’s important to remember that being included on one of Beall’s lists doesn’t necessarily mean that a journal is doing anything shady. Beall himself points out that the listed publications occupy a continuum from legitimate journals (albeit sometimes with poor internal controls and small readerships) to out-and-out scams.  As of 8 April, Beall’s lists include some 187 specific journals—from Academic Exchange Quarterly (Stuyvesant Falls, N.Y.)  to World Journal of Science and Technology (published by KRFD Society, Karnataka, India)—and 323 possibly shady publishers—ranging from Abhinav (Mumbai) to Wudpecker Research Journals (whereabouts unknown) and Wyno Academic Journals (Lagos, Nigeria). In at least two cases, scammers (apparently based in Armenia) have set up fake Web sites for two real journals that are not yet online. And the index includes a raft of titles in electronics and computer science ..."