WIKIMEDIA, REWORKEDOnline, open-access journals that publish research without proper review or quality controls have been multiplying in recent years. And, according to a new analysis published last week (October 1) in BMC Medicine, business for these so-called “predatory publishers” is good.
Information system scientists at the Hanken School of Economics in Finland found predatory publishers made about $75 million last year by publishing more than 400,000 studies. “The breadth and growth of predatory journals are astonishing and concerning,” Jocalyn Clark, a public health researcher at the University of Toronto who was not involved with the study, told Science. “I remain convinced that the market for these fake journals is endless.”
Cenyu Shen and Bo-Christer Björk, the researchers who conducted the study, gathered data from the websites of hundreds of journals that appear on an ever-growing list of predatory publishers curated by University of Colorado, Denver, librarian Jeffrey Beall. “It took more than half a year to finish the data collection,” Shen told Science. In the end, ...
