Predatory journals: A new threat to scientific publications

Abstract

The goal of the Open Access movement is to promote free access to scientific literature. From its creation in the nineties it has been a fundamental support to the democratization of knowledge. In the last years, however, a new fraud model has been detected: journals that use open access publications as “Predatory Journals”, which do not fulfill minimal quality standards and profit with the model. To inform the Latin American community about such editorial malpractice, we have reviewed the literature about this issue, aiming to explain what predatory journals are, how to detect them and how they contact authors. One of this article’s main conclusion is that students, academics and researchers need to develop skills to recognize this or any other kinds of publication fraud.