“Predatory” Publishing

by Brianne Selman, Scholarly Communications and Copyright Librarian

We all know there are many ways that the interests of good research and scholarship are not always served by publishing practices – whether it is citation manipulation, clear failings in peer review (or the outsourcing to AI), gaming the Journal Impact Factor,  special issues scandals, or paper mills. We may also suspect quality isn’t necessarily what is rewarded in our tenure and promotion processes, and probably due to some of these frustrations, language against predatory journals and conferences has made its way into some Faculty Based Criteria.

However, defining “predatory publishing” in a useful way is actually quite difficult, which is why Responsible Metrics movements like the Declaration on Research Assessment focus on assessing the research itself, instead of using the journal it is published in as a proxy.

Most of the major publishers don’t always adhere to the ‘best practices’ that are supposed to exclude them from being predatory. You can pay Taylor and Francis to rush your peer review. Mass editor resignations show pressure from publishers such as Wiley and Elsevier to override Editor independence and accept more articles, quite possibly because of the rise of pay-to-publish models and the temptation of $4000+ for each article. Whitelists, blacklists, and checklists for quality have proliferated as quickly as new journals have, with no clear or easy solution, particularly in a smaller publishing ecosystem like Canada, where we have many amazing small, niche, scholar-led journals of fantastic quality.