This is a controversial subject.
The preeminent journal in Orthopedics—The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery—tackled this increasingly urgent issue in its November 7, 2018 issue under the title “Predatory Publishing in Orthopaedic Research”.
The authors of the study—James Ray Yan, M.D. (McMaster University), Hassan Baldawi, M.D. (Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland-Medical University of Bahrain), Jonathan Robert Lex, MCBhB (University of Birmingham Medical School), Gabriel Simchovich, BSc (McMaster University), Louis-Phillippe Baisi, M.D. (McMaster University), Anthony Bozzo, M.D.CM (McMaster University), and Michelle Ghert, M.D., FRCSC (McMaster University)—found 225 possibly predatory orthopedic journals.
One was indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals and 20 (!) were indexed in PubMed. We contacted PubMed to ask how this was possible and they are still figuring when they can get back to us.
Predator Journals
The term “Predatory Journal” was coined in 2010 by University of Colorado librarian and assistant professor Jeffrey Beall.
Beall became curious about a bunch of ungrammatical spam emails he got in 2008 for, as he put it, “fishy-looking gold open access publishers I had never heard of before.”
He started keeping track. By 2011 he’d listed 23 suspicious journals. By 2016, the list had grown to 923.
And he found some common fishy attributes. For example:
- Duplicate editorial boards (e., two or more journals list the same editorial board).
- No geographical diversity among the editorial board members. By some miracle they all reside in the same town.
- No policies or practices for digital preservation. If the journal goes kaput, all content disappears.
- Copy-proofing (locking) their PDFs. Very hard to check for plagiarism.
- Journal name doesn’t match its mission.
- False claims of indexing in legitimate abstracting and indexing services.
- Even richer, claiming to be indexed in resources that do NOT provide abstracting or indexing services.
Today, there are tens of thousands of predatory and parasitic journals and virtually every academic researcher whose name adorns a legitimately published article is inundated with dozens of emails from these hucksters. Every day.
Predatory journals intentionally deceive authors and readers about their peer review functions, impact factors, organizational affiliations or editorial board memberships.
