Medical publishing and the threat of predatory journals

You have probably received spam e-mail solicitations from previously unknownpublishers inviting you to submit amanuscript to one of their journals, join an editorial board, or, perhaps, complete an ad hoc peer review of a scholarly manuscript. In fact, if you are like most researchers in the biomedical sciences, you have probably received such e-mails on a daily basis. Most of these spam e-mails come fromwhat I have termed predatory publishers: low-quality publishers that want to exploit your expertise and your need to publish. Along with other academic librarians, I have been tracking predatory publishers and monitoring their evolution. The aim of my work has been to help researchers avoid becoming victims of these exploitative and dishonest publishers and to show how they are threatening research. In this article, I will describe predatory publishers, identify how they operate andhurt researchers and science, and showdermatology researchers how best to avoid them. The early 2000s saw the emergence of the open-access movement, a socialmovement that argued for and promoted the transition to open-access publishing for academic journals. Under the successful, subscription journal publishing model, library subscriptions were the chief method to finance the publication of scholarly research. Open-access introduced a new method of financing journals in the form of author fees. In most cases, with the use of this publishing method, journals are freely accessible, and the publishing costs are covered by fees charged to authors upon acceptance of their articles for publication. In theory, the idea is great: no-cost access frees academic andmedical libraries from having to pay subscription charges, and published articles are accessible to anyone, anywhere, with internet access. Indeed, there are many open-access journals using the author-pays model that are ethical and successful. Although it does have weaknesses, the model itself is not the problem. The problem is the abuse of the author-pays model for profit, leading to the profusion of predatory publishers. Thus, while the open-access publishing model was born with noble intentions, many such initiatives have unintended, negative consequences, and open-access publishing is no exception. In this case, the downside is the built-in conflict of interest inherent in the open-access publishingmodel. Publishers who employ the model generate increased revenue if they publish more papers. This is great for the publisher but bad for science. The conflict of interest is in stark contrast to the demands of peer review, which, if performed honestly, often results in papers being rejected for publication. Marginal publishers realized this profitable weakness soon after the open-access movement started and began to seek as many manuscripts as possible for publication tomaximize their income. Realizing this, I coined the term predatory publisher (Beall, 2010).