Predatory open access publishing

In academic publishing, predatory open access publishing is an exploitative open-access publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals (open access or not). "Beall's List", a report that had been regularly updated by Jeffrey Beall until January 2017, set forth criteria for categorizing predatory publications and lists publishers and independent journals that meet those criteria. However, Beall's list was "unpublished" by the author in January 2017 (see below for more details; the list had 1155 inclusions as of 31 December 2016). Newer scholars from developing countries are said to be especially at risk of becoming the victim of these practices.

In July 2008, Richard Poynder's interview series brought attention to the practices of new publishers who were "better able to exploit the opportunities of the new environment." Doubts about honesty and scams in a subset of open-access journals continued to be raised in 2009. Concerns for spamming practices from the "black sheep among open access journals and publishers" ushered the leading open access publishers to create the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association in 2008. In another early precedent, in 2009 the Improbable Research blog had found that Scientific Research Publishing's journals duplicated papers already published elsewhere; the case was subsequently reported in Nature. In 2010, Cornell University graduate student Phil Davis (editor of the Scholarly Kitchen blog) submitted a manuscript consisting of computer-generated nonsense (using SCIgen) which was accepted for a fee (but withdrawn by the author). Predatory publishers have been reported to hold submissions hostage, refusing to allow them to be withdrawn and thereby preventing submission in another journal.

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