Unmasking the Hunter: An Exploration of Predatory Publishing

Abstract

Authors and their institutions are vulnerable to predatory publishers due to the “publish or perish” research mentality. The author’s spam-filtered emails from journals were collected for 90 days and analysed for 8 stylistic components; the journal website was explored for publishing fees, research ethics policies, and physical address; the publisher’s physical address was cross-checked in corporate registries for validation; each journal was checked for indexing in Embase®, MEDLINE®, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). One hundred twenty email solicitations were received from 101 journals. Overall, 52 (43.3%) solicitations were from specialty medical journals (e.g., endocrinology, cardiology, orthopaedics); 23 (19.2%) were sent from general medicine journals. Flattery (77 emails) and grammar errors (761 total, x̅ 6.3/email) were common. Publication fees ranged from free to USD 5,000, with some journals requiring copyright transfer to the publisher yet charging authors and claiming to be open access. Most journals were found to be based in either India (75.3%) or Nigeria (17.8%); however, the physical address noted on the journal website was often deceptive (70.3%) or undisclosed (13.9%). Some of the journals had either no research ethics policy (n=7) or a policy that addressed only plagiarism (n=16). Guidance to detect predatory publishers is provided.