The first solid indication of how widespread this problem really is came with last year's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) action against one of the largest and most profitable of the alleged predators, the prolific journal publisher and conference organizer OMICS, which publishes 785 titles generating over $50M in annual revenues. The FTC alleges that OMICS makes false promises of peer review in return for article processing charges (APCs), assesses those charges without disclosing them up front (then refuses to let authors withdraw their papers from submission), and lies about both the membership of its editorial boards and the names of presenters at the many conferences it sponsors - all classic examples of predatory publishing practices.
Now comes a small flood of even more alarming reports [...]
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(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:57PM (1 child)
And of course, there's the fact that not everyone knows they're dealing with a predatory journal.
"Oh we're open access, so we can't afford to pay for editing and review process unless you give us money for it" is something both high quality open access journals like Plos One do and the predatory scammers.
And not every professor and postdoc and adjunct is politically savvy enough to recognize which journals are complete bunk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @10:02AM
Even if they are savvy enough, they barely have time/opportunity to do thorough enough checking to distinguish some of these journals, especially considering that there have also been quite a few new arrivals on the scene targeting open access publication which do have seriously though peer review. You could guess that the only safe way would be to stick with long-time quality journals but you won't be able to meet the set constraints on publication amounts then too keep your job running for long as you'll quickly be passed by those who are less critical in their journal selection.