There is no perfect indicator! And some journals lie in a gray zone. However, COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) has identified some common features of predatory publications and some possible indicators as listed below:*
Commonly co-occurring features that may sufficiently characterise predatory publications are:
- Hidden or unclear author fees
- The lack of quality peer review of articles by experts in the field
- The guarantee of acceptance and/or the promise of very fast publication times (eg, within one week or 48 hours).
Other possible indicators of predatory publishing may include:
- Incomplete or misleading reporting of policies (including copyright and user licenses), processes, personnel, performance, and affiliations in the journal’s website or correspondence,
- Poor language usage (including poor grammar) and low production quality, both in the presentation of the journal’s description and guidelines, and in some of the articles that are published
- The lack of ethics policies and need for ethics declarations, particularly related to animal and human studies, conflicts of interest, and study funding
- The lack of any corrections/retractions of articles
- The lack of ability for articles to be retrieved on an electronic search platform in perpetuity, or for articles to be retrieved at all despite being listed in a table of contents.
COPE also details 16 warning signs of fake journals:*
- Website: The journal’s website contains misleading or false information (eg, indexing, metrics, membership of scholarly publishing organisations), lacks an ISSN or uses one that has already been assigned to another publication, mimics another journal/publisher’s site, or has no past or recent journal content.
- Name of journal: The journal name is the same as or easily confused with that of another; scope, or association.
- Peer review process: Peer review and peer review process and model are not mentioned, or manuscript acceptance or a very short peer review time is guaranteed. Submitted manuscripts receive inadequate or no peer review.
- Ownership and management: Information about the ownership and/or management is missing, unclear, misleading, or false.
- Governing body: Information on the editorial board is missing, misleading, false, or inappropriate for the journal; full names and affiliations of editorial board members are missing.
- Editorial team/contact information: Full names and affiliations of the journal’s editor/s and full contact information for the editorial office are missing, the editor-in-chief is also the owner/publisher, or the editor-in-chief is also the editor of many other journals, especially in unrelated fields.
- Copyright and licensing: Policies and notices of copyright (and publishing licence and user licence) are missing or unclear.
- Author fees: Mandatory fees for publication are not stated or not explained clearly on the journal website, submission system, or the letter of acknowledgement and/or are revealed only in the acceptance letter, as a condition of acceptance.
- Process for identification of and dealing with allegations of research misconduct: There is no description on how cases of alleged misconduct are handled.
- Publication ethics: There are no policies on publishing ethics (eg, authorship/contributorship, data sharing and reproducibility, intellectual property, ethical oversight, conflicts of interest, corrections/retractions).
- Publishing schedule: The periodicity of publication is not indicated and/or the publishing schedule appears erratic from the available journal content.
- Access: The way(s) in which content is available to readers, and any associated costs, is not stated, and in some cases listed articles are not available at all.
- Archiving: There is no electronic backup and preservation of access to journal content (despite such claims).
- Revenue sources: Business models, business partnerships/agreements, or revenue sources are not stated; publishing fees or waiver status are linked to editorial decision making.
- Advertising: Advertising policy is not given, or advertisements are linked to editorial decision making or are integrated with published content.
- Direct marketing: Direct marketing is obtrusive and gives misleading or false information
*Discussion document: Predatory Publishing. (2019). Committee on Publication Ethics. https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.3.6
