I just talked to a senior investigator who fell for a predatory publisher - he lost one of his significant work in a journal with no reliability. No editorial board, no peer reviewing - all that journal had was an OA model where anyone can publish anything with few hundreds of dollars. We live in a world where publications are an important metric of academic success. This is the same world with predatory journals, publishers, and scammers. As one of the largest bioinformatics community with members from around the world, it is our duty to educate, protect and inform our colleagues about this. I am inviting the BioStars community to list the journal and publishers that are requesting publications for in such journals.
Here is a link to FTC warning about predatory publication and related reports in WIRED and STATNEWS. Link to statement from NIH regarding this matter.
For the uninitiated, here is a definition of the predatory journal:
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 (See). However, Beall's list was "unpublished" by the author in January 2017 (see below for more details; the list had 1155 inclusions as of 31 December 2016).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.
Please try THINK CHECK SUBMIT checklist if you are new to academic publishing. Also, consult lists maintained by academic communities.
Do not publish your bioinformatics research in the following journals or publishers (please add and expand this list below as you encounter them).
- Beall's list on the internet archive - Journals http://web.archive.org/web/20170103170852/https://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/
- Beall's list on the internet archive - Publishers
- Research Consultants and Publisher http://www.recopublisher.org/index.php/Recopublisher
- BiscuitGlobal http://www.recopublisher.org/index.php/BiscuitGlobal/
- http://www.sciencepub123.com/
- http://www.outconfto.org/20170116/index.html
- http://www.xianterder.org/20170114/index.html
- http://www.kasmerajournal.com/index.html
The guy involved in recopublishers or biscuitglobal is a very dodgy person on social media, uses many false credentials. I have been keeping an eye on him.
You can still find Beall's list on the internet archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20170103170852/https://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/ http://web.archive.org/web/20161217142958/https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/