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Health Sciences Library

Getting Published: Predatory Publishing

This guide is intended to inform all researchers in the Rowan Community. When you are ready to submit a manuscript for publication or research to a conference, the information, resources, and tools on this guide can help you identify reputable publishers.

What is a Predatory Publisher?

While there isn’t a standard definition of what constitutes a predatory publisher the term describes publishers or entities that exploit authors by charging publication fees (commonly known as article processing charges) yet don’t deliver on the editorial and publishing services (such as peer review) that are associated with legitimate publishers. These publishers contribute to bad research and aid in the spread of misinformation. They engage in deceptive and unethical business practices and make false claims about a journal’s impact factor, indexing, high standards, and peer review.

These publishers prey on eager medical and graduate students’ desire to get published and faculty and researchers' need to publish in order to get an academic appointment, gain promotion, or achieve tenure.
 

Help with Validating Journals

Use the following directories, resources, and tools to help find quality journals and discover predatory and deceptive ones. 

Identifying a Predatory Journal or Publisher

It can be difficult identifying predatory journals and publishers. Just as with making a big purchase doing your research and using common sense is warranted.  

Look for the following signs:

  • Limited or ill-defined peer review process
  • Peer review process and time to publication is quick (i.e., days)
  • Contact information is missing, incomplete, or leads to unavailable links
  • Contacts use commercial email addresses such as Gmail or Yahoo rather than institutional or publisher email addresses    
  • A physical address for the publisher is not listed or available
  • The name of the journal or the website seem similar to, but is not, the website or title of an established journal
  • Unclear or falsely claimed affiliation to scholarly associations or reputable organizations
  • The journal doesn’t have an ISSN and the articles don’t have DOIs 
  • The same publisher publishes multiple journals with a broad scope and from different disciplines
  • Editors and editorial board members are from all over the world and have no academic credentials (or are unaware that they are listed)

Ask yourself the following when evaluating the journal

  • Is the journal's mission and scope clearly defined?
  • Are there spelling and grammar errors on the website, in titles and abstracts?
  • Is there an editorial team you can contact? Or are the email addresses non-professional and non-journal/publisher affiliated?
  • Is there a submission fee instead of a publication fee? 
  • Does the journal charge excessive fees for publication? It should be clear what fees are paid for. Predatory publishers hide fees until after you submit your manuscript.
  • Does the journal make claims about its impact or citation rate using unfamiliar measures and scales that can’t be found or proven?
  • Does the journal make claims about affiliations with organizations and institutions that can't be verified? 
  • What bibliographic databases, such as PubMed, Web of Science, or Scopus is the journal indexed in?  
  • Are there clear production, peer-review and publication processes?

If you can’t, or it’s vague, or difficult to find this information on the journal or publishers' website then be suspicious.  
 

What to Do If You Have Interacted with a Predatory Journal

1. If You Have Published in a Predatory Journal

  •  If You Submitted but Did Not Sign a Copyright Agreement
    • Contact the journal’s publisher/editors to request the withdrawal and removal of your article from their publishing system in writing.
    • Your article can still be published elsewhere as long as you haven’t transferred copyright to the predatory publisher.
  • Removing Your Article: Once an article has been published in a predatory journal and the author has signed a copyright transfer approving publication, removal may be unlikely without legal action. However, you can:
    • Contact the journal’s publisher/editors to request the removal of your article.
    • If you retained the copyright as an author, consider submitting a DMCA takedown notice.
  • Republishing Options:
    • If you retained the copyright of the article, the library may be able to assist you in republishing the article in Rowan University’s Institutional Repository, Rowan Digital Works.  This will at least ensure the article is issued a DOI and indexed and discoverable in Google Scholar.
    • If you retained the copyright but cannot withdraw your article, you may contact the editor of a legitimate journal, explain the situation, and seek their guidance.

While rare, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has documented cases where papers initially published in unethical journals were accepted by legitimate ones.

Need Help?

Need help or assistance with getting published?

Contact your Rowan Library:

Help with Publishing

  • List of journals falsely claiming to be indexed by DOAJ - A blog from DOAJ that list journals that say, or have said in the past, that they are indexed in DOAJ but they are NOT.
  • SHERPA/RoMEO - An online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of self-archiving permissions and conditions of rights given to authors on a journal-by-journal basis.
  • Instructions to Authors in the Health Sciences - The Mulford Health Science Library of the Medical College of Ohio provides an extensive directory of Instructions to Authors in the Health Sciences, and in most cases provides links directly to the instructions
  • Retraction Watch Hijacked Journals Checklist - This list, maintained by Retraction Watch, identifies predatory journals that have hijacked the names, websites, and reputations of legitimate journals.