Predatory medical journals

Abstract

After the advent and ubiquitous presence of the Internet, many medical journals began to publish their content online and most readers preferred to access their information on research via the Web. This was generally free and the phenomenon of Open Access journals was born. Advertisements and subscriptions to print journals declined[1] and to generate revenue the new online publications began to demand that, to be included in their publication, contributors needed to pay an article processing fee which was usually fairly substantial. This was affordable by western researchers who either paid themselves or were supported by funding agencies but those in the poorer developing countries who did not have such access became even further excluded from publishing their work to a wide international audience. This became a fertile ground for the beginning of the so-called ‘Predatory’ medical journals. The term was coined in 2008 by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, USA.[2] He published a list of journals whose common characteristics were that they were much cheaper to enter than the mainstream publications but to attract contributors who were mainly from the third world they promised quick publication which meant that the articles were not sent for peer review, their editing was cursory with little attention paid to language as well as scientific content. The listed publishers were mostly non-existent and the journals were not included in most indexing services like PubMed or the Directory of Open Access Journals. Thus, the articles carried are ignored by most of the scientific community being cited very rarely.[3] Most of them originate and receive and publish papers from developing countries where the ‘publish or perish’ phenomenon previously confined to the West has spread. The reputation of a researcher no longer depends on the quality, but now, the quantity of articles he or she publishes.[4] There has been a veritable explosion in the number of these predatory journals which has now reached more than 8000 worldwide and they collectively publish 420,000 articles every year, nearly a fifth of the scientific community’s annual output of 2.5 million papers.[5] They carry dubious titles like ‘International Journal of …’ and most of them are located in the developing world, usually Asia (25% in India) or Africa, although to enhance their credibility they claim that they are based in the USA or UK. Scholars in the developing world feel that reputable Western journals might be prejudiced against them not only because the unfamiliar English language is poor, the science is weak and their content is not relevant to their largely western readers. Thus, they feel their chances of acceptance are greater by submitting their articles to ‘predatory’ whose author fees are lower and publication is rapid. Other scholars may be unaware of the reputation of these journals and would not have selected them had they known. However, some scholars have said that they would still have published in the same journals if their institution recognised them. The pressure to ‘publish or perish’ is another factor influencing many scholars’ decisions to publish in these fast-turnaround journals, and in a few cases, researchers do not have adequate guidance and lacked the knowledge of research to submit to a more reputable journal. It is however not always easy to recognise whether a journal is ‘predatory’ just because their primary aim is to make money. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. It has a unique model wherein the producer of the goods, the article’s authors, actually pays the buyer ‘processing charges’ which include having its quality assessed by peer reviewers, who do this free as a civic duty, and then providing it to the reader gratis or for a small sum. Thus, the total global revenues of medical publishers are more than £19bn, which is somewhere between the US recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724 m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google or Amazon posted that year.[6] The upshot of this profit obsession was that the entire Elsevier Board resigned on 10th July 2023,[7] because they felt the company was ‘deeply exploitative’ in trying to steer the journals to increase its acceptances sevenfold and broaden the scope of design studies it would consider, without seeking the cooperation of the editors. That is, making them more ‘predatory’. We ourselves feel that till the mainstream western journals become more liberal towards processing and publishing articles from the developing world, we should continue to support ‘predatory’ journals. At least the results of our research will not be discarded but potentially become available to a wider audience and, who knows, its standards as well as the quality of these journals might eventually improve.