Authors Beware: Open Access Predatory Journals.

Email notices of spurious offers of newly discovered inheritances, false reporting describing security breaches of financial accounts, and other deceptive ploys are received on a continuous basis by email users. these emails have only one purpose—to illegally capture the recipients’ confidential account information for fraudulent purposes. hopefully, these intentionally deceptive notices are recognized as counterfeit by most recipients. unfortunately, this deceptive practice for unscrupulous financial gain is now targeting open access publishing. dr. jeffrey beall, a recognized expert in exposing fraudulent open access publishing, has coined the term “predatory publishers,” an appropriate description of the interlopers who have entered into the publishing realm of science, clinical practice, and scholarship. predatory is an apt term to describe these so-called publishers as it refers to those who are “inclined or intended to injure or exploit others for personal gain or profit” (merriam-webster dictionary, 2015). Unfortunately, the damaging consequences of predatory publishers are many, pervasive and long-lasting. Authors are harmed both personally and professionally. Unknowingly authors pay the “publication costs” to have their articles published and freely accessible to readers. The costs incurred by submitting authors range from several hundreds to thousands of dollars. Professionally, articles published in predatory journals are not indexed in any reputable bibliographic database such as CINAHL and PubMed. The articles published in predatory journals are destined as tainted as having not been legitimately peer-reviewed and therefore not acceptable for scientific and professional