This is part of the series of webinars of Aprender3C and DOAJ: “Transparencia y buenas prácticas en revistas de Acceso Abierto” / "Transparency and best practice in Open Access Journals"
Presented by our DOAJ Ambassador in China Cenyu Shen
2. Agenda
• Introduction to Gold OA publishing market
• Background to questionable OA publishing
• Main results of my ealier research on questionable
OA publishing
• Reflections upon this issue
6. •Jeffrey Beall coined the term “predatory publishers”
•John Bohannon's experiment
• Definition:
“The sort of OA publishers and journals who only aims to
collect article processing charges (APCs), but they lack
RIGOROUS peer review and PROPER marketing practices”
8. •Two major characteristics:
•Inappropriate marketing practices
•Spam emails
•Journal titles with “International”, “American” or “European”
•Fake impact factors
•Advertise a very short publishing time
•Advertise a relative low publication fees
•No or little quality control of contents
•Low-standard peer review process or even don’t have peer
review at all
•Other typical characteristics
10. •Earlier research about questionable OA publishing have so far
mainly concentrated on exposing lacking peer review and
scandals involving publishers and journals.
•There is a lack of serious studies about several aspects of this
phenomenon, including extent and regional effects.
•The aim of our study is to provide a comprehensive
understanding of questionable publishers and/or journals in
terms of
•distribution of publishers and authors acorss regions
•the number of journals
•the number of articles published over the past five years
•APC costs
•publication time
20. •60.3% - Asia (34.7%
from India)
•2.3% - South America
•16.4% - Africa
21. • To conclude, between 2010 and 2014, there was a
dramatic rise in the number of questionable OA journals
and articles published by them with exceptional low APCs
of 300 USD per journal and a short publishing time
between 2-3 months.
• The problem of questionable OA publishing is highly
limited and regional to a few developing countries, where
‘international publication’ is a prerequisite for academic
appointment, more funding, or promotion.
23. •Questionable OA publishers and/or journals has (1) caused
negative publicity to OA publishing in general (‘pay to
publish’) and (2) posed a danger to the landscape of
Science (‘production of low-quality research’)
•What can we do to combat the fast growth of
questionable OA publishing market?
•It's critical to (1) every stakeholder need to play a role (2)
call for collaborative efforts from various key stakeholders
to find the effective solutions.