A Scholarly Sting Operation Shines a Light on ‘Predatory’ Journals - The New York Times

"There are now thousands of fake open-access journals, about as many as legitimate ones, according to one of the creators of Dr. Fraud, Katarzyna Pisanski, a researcher in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex in England, and her colleagues.

It was that alternate world that Dr. Fraud tapped into. The legitimate journals rejected her application out of hand, but many fake ones did not hesitate to take her on.

The investigators, writing about their sting operation in Nature, said they had seen young colleagues fall for the blandishments of predatory journals, not realizing that the emails they received were from publications that only wanted their money. Dr. Pisanski and her colleagues wanted to help researchers understand how fake journals operated."