CII-Predatory Journals practices

Predatory Journals or Predatory Publishers is an exploitative business model which characteristic feature is charging publication fees without providing the accountable scientific editorial services (more about our scientific editorial services).

Predatory Journals use open access policy in order to justify charging publication fees to authors – the article is published immediately after a payment but without preserving the appropriate standards of publications for the scientific journals. Additionally, Predatory Journals use misleading communication such as:

• providing false information about the involvement of well-known Researchers in the review process of a particular journal;
• spreading false information about the journal’s indexation in trustworthy bibliographic bases;
• presenting fake bibliometric indicators, very often similar to those indicators which are highly respected in the scientific community;
• lack of verification concerning the authenticity of manuscripts;
• charging for adding names to the list of the authors of works that were not written by them.

Predatory Journals phenomena leads to the “erosion” of the quality of scientific activity. In most educational systems, publications in scientific journals are the bases for the periodical assessment of the scientific workers and very often decide about their promotion, which include autonomy in conducting the researches and training the future scientists. People who have gained their scientific autonomy through Predatory Journals services have no proper knowledge and no real academic achievements, which may lead to ineffective usage of the academic resources as well as the sponsors of scientific researchers.

Our Experts has attempted to develop a systematic strategies for counteracting the Predatory Journals practices. Such procedures give us a possibility to identify the journals using the above mentioned practices and raise standards of scientific journals’ editorial services. The aims of our activities are:

•   identification of the journals using Predatory Journals practices
•  creating the methods which will stop the Predatory Journals’ practices, 
•  increase social awareness concerning Predatory Journals actions,
•  the raise of standards in scientific journals’ editorial services,
•  development of tools which will diminish the scale of this phenomena, including the encouragement of the journals to self-development that will let them to abandon unethical publication practices.

Each journal applying for indexation in the our Master List database is verified in case of using Predatory Journals practices (more about the verification process).

If the journal positively passes the process of verification, it is indexed in the our Master List database for a given year. In case when our Experts find out that the Editorial Office spreads false information, does not follow the transparency rule , the given journal will not be indexed for a particular year, and its details will be marked with the proper alert (more about journal’s warning and alerts).