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Predatory Publishing Guide

Predatory Journals - What, How, Why?

Predatory journals began to appear in the early 2000s. 

    • It was a perfect storm with the rise of the internet and the growth of OA models.
    • The internet and digital publishing platforms dramatically reduced the cost and complexity of publishing and distributing academic work online.
    • And while the OA movement democratized access to scholarly information, it also created opportunities for exploitation. Predatory journals took advantage by imitating reputable OA journals.

The number of predatory journals has grown rapidly from 2000 to 2025

    • Around 1,800 existed in 2010
    • This number rose to 8,000 by 2016
    • It reached 12,000 in 2019
    • By 2025, nearly 20,000 predatory journals have been identified

(Leducq 2023, Rajakumar 2025)

In 2010, Jeffrey Beall (2017), a librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, drew widespread attention to this issue by creating a list of potential, possible, or probable predatory publishers and journals.  However in 2017, he retracted the list due to pressure from predatory publishers.

In 2017, Cabell’s, a publisher of a serials directory, launched a searchable database of predatory journals.  To help researchers and authors make informed decisions about where to publish their work, in 2019, the Library acquired Cabell’s Predatory Reports as an additional tool, to be used alongside a predatory journal checklist. 

Legal Action – Court Rules in FTC’s Favor Against Predatory Academic Publisher OMICS Group

In 2019, a federal judge ordered journal publisher and conference organizer Srinubabu Gedela and his companies to pay more than $50.1 million to resolve Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charges that they made deceptive claims to academics and researchers about the nature of their conferences and publications, and hid steep publication fees.

This case raised the awareness of the academic scholarly community to carefully vet journals before submitting manuscripts, especially with the growth of legitimate open-access journals.

What Are Predatory Journals?

Predatory publishers use unethical practices to exploit open access publishing for their own profit. While these publishers often operate under the guise of legitimate open-access models, they prioritize profit over scholarly integrity. Authors pay high fees for publication (article processing charges or APCs) often without the standard editorial and peer review services provided by legitimate journals.

Common characteristics include – but are not limited to – the following:

  • Aggressive solicitation practices through spam emails
  • Exploits the need for academics to publish, especially early career academics and researchers
  • Goal is to make money instead of publishing scholarly research
  • High article processing charges (APCs) without transparency
  • Unethical business practices
  • Does not follow scholarly publishing best practices, including:
    • Lack of proper peer review
    • Editorial board is not stated or incomplete and/or non-verifiable
  • No concern for the quality of work published
  • Claims to have an impact factor or citation metrics that cannot be verified
  • Copycats name or website of other well-known, legitimate journals

How Does Predatory Publishing Work?

In the open access (OA) model, the author’s articles processing charges (APCs) cover the publishing costs. This contrasts with the traditional subscription model where readers or institutions pay to access content. Predatory publishers pretend to operate legitimate open access journals. Not only do they take advantage of the OA’s author-pays model, these predatory publishers do not follow accepted best scholarly publishing practices.

Common tactics are as follows:

Beware if the solicitation email is from an unknown publisher, sounds too good to be true, contains grammatical errors or is poorly formatted.

Why Is It Harmful to Publish in a Predatory Journal?

Publishing in legitimate open access journals offers significant advantages related to quality, visibility, academic reputation, and copyright protection. Risks and dangers of publishing in a predatory journal can include:

  • Lack of Peer-Review – predatory journals often forego peer review or make promises of a rigorous, yet speedy peer-review process. Rigorous peer review is a time-consuming, multi-step process. It establishes the validity of the research, prevents falsified work from being accepted and published and allows authors to revise and improve papers before publication. Predatory publishers often publish papers that have not gone through any peer-review process. This lack of scientific rigor can undermine the quality and integrity of scientific research.
  • Limited Visibility – legitimate publishers are committed to preserving your published work. Papers published in predatory journals could disappear from the journal's website at any time. This makes it difficult to prove that the research was published in a said journal when applying for promotion or tenure.
  • Impact – predatory publishers may falsely claim to be indexed in reputable databases such as MEDLINE, EMBASE, Scopus, Web of Science, or CINAHL. Due to poor reputations of predatory journals, the research published in non-indexed journals may be viewed as being low quality and untrustworthy. The research findings may be overlooked by the scientific community and hinder the researcher’s chances to be discovered, cited, or have a meaningful impact.
  • Reputation Damage – publishing in predatory journals can hurt the reputation of researchers, their career advancement as well as their institutions.
  • Ethical Concerns – publishing in predatory journals can introduce low-quality research or misinformation into the scientific literature, which can mislead subsequent research, negatively influence public policies, and hinder social progress. Researchers have an ethical responsibility to ensure their work is published in journals that adhere to high ethical standards, including transparency, rigorous peer- review, and editorial integrity.
  • Copyright – predatory publishers may require the author to sign away copyright at the time of submission stage which would prevent the author from submitting the article to another publisher.

References:

Cook (2023), Cortegiani (2020), Elmore (2020), Eriksson (2017), Ferris (2017), McCann (2017)

Predatory Journal and Predatory Conference Table

Refer to the table in the Red Flags section. If you answer "yes" to a majority of the characteristics, the journal may be predatory. Beware!

Cabells Predatory Report

The intent of Cabells Predatory Reports is to help users identify potentially deceptive and predatory academic journals. Each journal is evaluated against specific criteria to screen and identify misleading peer review practices, indexing and metrics, publication practices, article processing charges, copyright, and other warning signs.  Using Cabells Predatory Reports, LibKey shows a warning when an article or website domain is associated with a journal or URL labelled as predatory.  When you click on the warning, you will be taken to a page with a summary of the violations and a link to view the full report in Cabells Predatory Reports.

Withdrawing a Manuscript from a Predatory Journal

Once an author has signed a copyright transfer or approved publication of an article in a predatory journal, your chances of having the article removed from the journal are improbable.

If your article is already published in a predatory journal, you can consider the following options:

  • Contact the publisher (by email, phone, and certified letter) and request for the article to be removed from the website.
  • Most of the time, authors will not receive a response back from the publisher, even after repeated attempts.
  • If you have NOT signed a copyright agreement with the predatory publisher:
    • Your article can still be published in a legitimate journal. We recommend contacting the editor-in-chief of the legitimate journal, explaining the situation to them, and seeking their guidance.
    • If the paper is accepted in a legitimate journal, it may appear with an editorial note on the paper to explain the situation.

Withdrawal of Accepted Manuscript from Predatory Journal – COPE: Committee on Publication Ethics. Case Number 16-22, 2016.

Tools

  • Think.Check.Submit – an international, cross-sector initiative that aims to educate researchers, promote integrity, and build trust in credible research and publications; includes a checklist and other tools.
  • Journal Evaluation Tool – created by Loyola Marymount University librarians (Rele 2017), the rubric can help authors evaluate journals and decide whether a journal is legitimate or predatory.
  • Retraction Watch Hijacked Journals Checker – a dynamic list of hijacked journal titles. Hijacked journals mimic legitimate journals by adopting their titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without permission from the original journal.

Rele, Shilpa; Kennedy, Marie; and Blas, Nataly, "Journal Evaluation Tool" (2017). LMU Librarian Publications & Presentations. 40. https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/librarian_pubs/40

Resources

  • Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing – the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association's principles of transparency and best practices for journals and publishers.
  • Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) – provides advice to editors and publishers on all aspects of publication ethics and, in particular, how to handle cases of research and publication misconduct.
  • Retraction Watch – tracks article retractions. In the process, it sometimes highlights unethical publishing practices.
  • Directory of Open Access Journals – search for open access journals that have been vetted following inclusion criteria.
  • Journal Citation Reports – search for a journal’s impact factor (Clarivate)
  • CiteScore – search for a journal’s impact factor (Scopus)
  • SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) – uses Scopus citation data to calculate the weighted prestige of journal.  It represents the average number of weighted citations received in the selected year by number or documents published in the chosen journal during the previous three years.
  • SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Page) – normalizes the citation impact based on the citation potential in a journal's subject field.  It divides the number of citations by the citation potential in the journal's field, which accounts for differences in citation practices across disciplines
  • Open Policy Finder (formerly Sherpa Services) – a searchable database of publisher's policies regarding the self-archiving of journal articles on the web and in Open Access repositories.

Combating predatory publishing requires teamwork and support. This guide provides information about predatory publishing, covering journals and conferences. It's meant to be a helpful resource, but ultimately, it's up to each author to decide where to publish or present their work.

References

Beall, J. (2017). What I learned from predatory publishers.  Biochem Med (Zagreb), 27(2), 273-278. https://doi.org/10.11613/bm.2017.029 or PubMed Central link https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5493177  

Cobey, K. D., Lalu, M. M., Skidmore, B., Ahmadzai, N., Grudniewicz, A., & Moher, D. (2018). What is a predatory journal? A scoping review. F1000Res, 7, 1001. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.15256.2 

Cook, F., Govender, R., & Brennan, P. A. (2023). Greetings from your predatory journal! What they are, why they are a problem, how to spot and avoid them. Br J Oral Maxillofac Surg, 61(3), 245-247. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bjoms.2023.02.005

Cortegiani, A., Catalisano, G., & Manca, A. (2022). Predatory journals and conferences. In Integrity of scientific research: fraud, misconduct and fake news in the academic, medical and social environment (pp. 501-508). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99680-2_49

Cukier, S., Lalu, M., Bryson, G. L., Cobey, K. D., Grudniewicz, A., & Moher, D. (2020). Defining predatory journals and responding to the threat they pose: A modified Delphi consensus process. BMJ Open, 10(2), e035561. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-035561

Elmore, S. A., & Weston, E. H. (2020). Predatory journals: What they are and how to avoid them. Toxicol Pathol, 48(4), 607-610. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192623320920209

Ferris, L. E., & Winker, M. A. (2017). Ethical issues in publishing in predatory journals [Review]. Biochemia Medica, 27(2), 279-284. https://doi.org/10.11613/BM.2017.030

Grudniewicz, A., Moher, D., Cobey, K. D., Bryson, G. L., Cukier, S., Allen, K., Ardern, C., Balcom, L., Barros, T., Berger, M., Ciro, J. B., Cugusi, L., Donaldson, M. R., Egger, M., Graham, I. D., Hodgkinson, M., Khan, K. M., Mabizela, M., Manca, A.,…Lalu, M. M. (2019). Predatory journals: No definition, no defence. Nature, 576(7786), 210-212. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03759-y 

Leducq, S., Bonsu, N., Clement, K., Barlow, R., & Williams, H.C. (2023). Predator and alien: The threat of predatory journals and conferences. Clin Exp Dermatol, 48(8), 847-853. https://doi.org/10.1093/ced/llad133

McCann, T. V., & Polacsek, M. (2018). False gold: Safely navigating open access publishing to avoid predatory publishers and journals. J Adv Nurs, 74(4), 809-817. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.13483 

Rajakumar, H.K. (2025). Seductive emails, dangerous consequences: how predatory journals, conferences and publishers target early-career researchers. Postgrad Med J, 101 (1192), 177-179.  https://doi.org/10.1093/postmj/qgae167

Shamseer, L., Moher, D., Maduekwe, O., Turner, L., Barbour, V., Burch, R., Clark, J., Galipeau, J., Roberts, J., & Shea, B. J. (2017). Potential predatory and legitimate biomedical journals: Can you tell the difference? a cross-sectional comparison [Article]. BMC Med, 15(1), Article 28. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-017-0785-9

Tomlinson, O. W. (2024). Predatory publishing in medical education: A rapid scoping review. BMC Med Educ, 24(1), 33. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05024-x