BMJ Blogs: The BMJ » Blog Archive » Jocalyn Clark: Predatory journals debate raises controversies—but they’re not going away

"I think it’s fair to say that the topic of so-called predatory journals was the hot one at the recent World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) conference. The meeting coincided with the publication of new evidence of the enormous growth of the market of predatory open access journals. Shen and Bjork reported in BMC Medicine last week that the predatory journal market had grown in just five years to the level of the legitimate open access publishing business. Science Magazine led with a headline that “predatory publishers earned $75 million last year.” The new estimates say 420,000 articles were published in 8,000 journals by 963 predatory publishers. This compares to about 10,000 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals, which vets legitimacy. (By comparison the global publishing business is said to be worth $244 million for genuine open access journals, and an astonishing $10.5 billion annually for scholarly subscription journals.) I summarised the new findings during my talk on predatory journals at the WAME conference to support my argument that this is a growing problem that urgently needs more attention. I also urged delegates to demand more accountability and responsibility for the problem from multiple stakeholders—authors, institutions, funders, and professional bodies including WAME. Much discussion ensued ..."