A Brief History and Forms of Predatory Publishing

Over many decades, the scholarly publishing system has developed a structured process for publishing in scholarly journals: researchers submit articles to journals, peers within the discipline evaluate them through a peer-review process and decide whether the results are ready for publication. Articles are only published after review. Until the 1990s, scholarly journals were almost exclusively funded through subscriptions: libraries paid for access (electronic or in print), while authors generally did not incur publication costs.

With the expansion of the internet in the early 2000s, the demand for freely accessible research results grew. The Open Access movement advocated using the possibilities of electronic publishing to make scientific knowledge freely available online to anyone who's interested. Since Open Access journals are free to read, their production costs cannot be covered by subscriptions and must instead be financed through alternative business models. Since the emergence of Open Access, various funding models have been established (see also the next section of this module). One of them is the introduction of Article Processing Charges (APCs) - publication fees for articles, and Book Processing Charges (BPCs) for books. These fees are typically paid by authors, their institutions, or funding bodies.

What Happened Next

The APC- and BPC-based funding model, along with its growing acceptance, also created opportunities for misuse. Since the 2000s, providers have emerged that exploit this model. These so-called predatory publishers recognized that it is possible to generate profit through journals that appear scholarly and promise rapid publication, while disregarding the high standards such as peer review and editorial quality assurance. They attract authors through aggressive e-mail solicitations, fake impact factors, and seemingly credible websites.

Further Forms of Predatory Practices

In addition to predatory journals, there are other forms of questionable practices within the scholarly ecosystem.

These include so-called predatory conferences, which present themselves as legitimate academic events but lack proper review of submitted contributions.

So-called vanity presses often charge high fees for publishing books without implementing quality assurance measures such as editing or peer-review.

Hijacked journals copy or imitate websites of legitimate journals in order to deceive authors into submitting manuscripts and paying publication fees.

Conclusion

Today, predatory publishing presents one of the most pressing challenges for research ethics and scholarly publishing.

Therefore, universities, libraries, and research organizations took on the task to inform about scholarly publishing and quality assurance in the research process.