In the traditional model, authors did not pay for publishing but relinquished their copyright to publishers who then sold access to their publications. Some of these journals have already migrated to other publishers, while others are doing so. This can harm patients. Keep in mind that there are now fake Impact Factor providers who will, for a fee, assign fake impact factors to journals willing to pay. You can use the following clues & criteria for selecting a journal for publishing your research. They essentially serve predatory journals by giving fake impact factors to whoever pays them.So when you see the impact factor of a journal, and are tempted to publish there, make sure you can identify the service who determined it before you take it seriously.If you are not sure where an impact factor comes from, you can consult the list of journals indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information, to determine if they index it, at We encourage AKU authors to publish in Open Access journals but they should be cautious and on the lookout for offers from “Predatory Journals”. Beware that publishing in such journals might not be recognized in academic promotion processes. Predatory journals pretend to be legitimate Open Access journals, but in reality their goal is to exploit the Open Access author-pays model, by charging researchers publication fees without providing any of the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals, e.g. "We Adore Your Research" in the subject line) we get are typically sent using Gmail, Yahoo or such free email, and rarely provide the names of editors. They often have a very weak peer review process (if any at all) and will, in fact, publish anything if the author pays the fees. The strong growth of open access has brought with it a large number of rogue publishers and so called predatory journals. Please enable scripts and reload this page.It looks like your browser does not have JavaScript enabled.
quality peer review. Eduardo Franco Please turn on JavaScript and try again. As an example, one major publisher makes about one billion dollars a year selling scholarly publications, often to the very institutions that financed the research they came from.The Open Access model gives authors and institutions free access to published scholarship. Predatory publishing is an exploitative fraudulent open-access publishing model that applies charges under the pretense of legitimate publishing operations without actually providing the editorial services associated with legitimate journals. Such journals are termed as ‘Predatory Journals’. Recognized journals do not solicit publication from potential authors.Publishing fees should be clear with full contact details including email, postal address and working telephone number.Jeffrey Beal, a librarian from the University of Colorado, maintains a web site on This web site has become the preferred source for librarians and researchers. Researchers suggest that low-cost, open access publishing serves a useful purpose in the global arena.4,17,18 Giving space to regional journals would help to reduce deceptive publishing practices, and help socioeconomically disadvantaged authors to publish in legitimate, open-access journals at no or low cost.2 Similarly, scholars suggest that instead of discussing predatory … anti-vaxxers).
Already, researchers and patients are struggling to separate good from the junk that is online, and the explosion of predatory OA has made this even more challenging. It is a very useful tool for quick identification of possible predatory scholarly Open Access journals and publishers as well as fake Impact Factor providers.Please consult Beal's list if you are not certain of the quality of any OA journal or IF provider. Typically, they will include some address based in the US, but careful scrutiny would suggest they are based out of India or Africa.