Predatory journals enter biomedical databases through public funding | The BMJ

"In the past decade the scientific community has faced a serious threat to its integrity and credibility with the rise of predatory journals. These journals manipulate and exploit the open access publishing model but omit the quality checks and editorial services that are routinely provided by legitimate journals, such as peer review, plagiarism detection, and verification of ethical approval of experiments. Although the descriptor “predatory” has been criticised for grossly conflating poor quality with misconduct and for simplistically classifying the scholarly publishing environment into bad and good (predatory or not),1 the term is now widely accepted to describe the phenomenon....

US government agencies have been indirectly paying through their grants in excess of $3m to cover APCs for one single predatory publisher, OMICS, which gains access to PMC because federal funds are being used to pay for publication in their journals. Our estimate of $3.2m was based on a fraction of articles and journals from OMICS so might be an underestimate of the true cost. We only examined a relatively small number of the journals published by OMICS that entered PMC due to one or more individual articles being deposited by NIH-funded authors (234 of the 700+ journals in total). Similarly, we did not sample other predatory publishers. Moreover, Moher and colleagues8 extrapolated at least 18 000 funded biomedical research studies published in poorly indexed, scientifically questionable journals, which would lead to a considerable increase of our $3m estimate. Predatory journals charge quite different APCs, preventing reliable estimates of the waste of patients’ and researchers’ time, animals, and (mostly public) money...."