Bogus journals weighing down research in India | education$higher-studies | Hindustan Times

"In the current scenario, setting up a publication is as easy as creating a website. These so-called academic journals lure researchers with the promise of quick publication time and names that sound legitimate. As publishing in international journals fetches more points in the API, many bogus Indian publishers prefix their titles with ‘international’ or ‘world’. Or, as seen in the case of Springer Group of Journals, they simply 'borrow' the titles of renowned international players.

A big stumbling block to checking this phenomenon is the absence of a universally accepted definition of a predatory journal. Though Jeffrey Beall, an associate professor and librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, decided to make a list of predatory publications in 2008, pressure from publishers brought it down earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Indian researchers are increasingly finding predatory outfits an attractive medium of publication. Almost 35% of the papers published in 'cash-seeking, pay-to-publish journals' reportedly come from India.

This figure far exceeds India’s overall share of the world’s scholarly output (4.4% in 2016). The UGC chose to turn a blind eye to the problem until January. After academics cried foul, it came out with a list of 38,000 journals where academics would have to publish for the researcher to earn points in the API system.

[...]

There is also the matter of cost. Indian authors have used 488 open access journals who charge anywhere between ₹500 and ₹3.24 lakh in a period of five years to publish about 15,400 papers. India could be spending as much as US$2.4 million annually on author processing charges, another paper in Current Science found.

This is a problem for a country that spends around 1% of its GDP on research."