Money down the drain: predatory publishing in the COVID-19 era
- PDF / 177,391 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 97 Downloads / 174 Views
SPECIAL SECTION ON COVID-19: LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Money down the drain: predatory publishing in the COVID-19 era Dominique Vervoort 1
&
Xiya Ma 2 & Mark G. Shrime 3
Received: 17 August 2020 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 # The Canadian Public Health Association 2020
Dear Editor: For years, predatory journals have exploited authors by soliciting papers through email and social media, offering to publish articles open access quickly and with minimal review, often with a fee (Beall 2012). The publish-or-perish mentality in academia and barriers for researchers from low- and middleincome countries (LMICs) to publish led to a surge of predatory journals offering an easy way out (Forero et al. 2018). This conceals research from the scientific community, impeding scientific advancement and affecting authors’ reputation. Upon receiving multiple requests from predatory journals to publish manuscripts related to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), we assessed the scope of exploitative practices these journals engaged in by soliciting and publishing COVID-19 articles and earning off of vulnerable authors in a time where novel and accurate information is highly needed. We analyzed journals listed by two predatory journal watchdogs: Beall’s List and Stop Predatory Journals (Supplementary Material) (Beall 2020; Stop Predatory Journals 2020). Journals with inactive websites (n = 484) were excluded. Remaining journals (n = 833) were manually searched for articles published with variations of “coronavirus”, “COVID-19”, or “SARS-CoV2” in manuscript titles between January and May 2020. Articles were categorized as original articles, reviews, or commentaries/editorials per
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.17269/s41997-020-00411-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Dominique Vervoort [email protected] 1
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 615 North Wolfe Street, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA
2
Faculty of Medicine, University of Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
3
Institute of Global Surgery, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Dublin, Ireland
journals’ guidelines, and Article Processing Charges (APCs) were identified. A total of 367 articles (125 original articles, 172 reviews, 70 commentaries/editorials) related to COVID-19 were published across 114 (13.7%) of the included journals. APCs were available for 92 (80.7%) of the journals that published COVID-19 papers. Authors were estimated to have paid US$46,057.41 to publish in these journals. Seven (6.1%) journals reported zero APCs or other charges. Five journals had PubMed/MEDLINE indexing. When excluding these to account for some uncertainty, US$33,807.41 was paid to publish 350 articles in the remaining 109 journals. Our results are in line with previous evidence of unethical practices by predatory journals, including scripted mail invitations, smaller but additive publication fees—which disproportionally affect LMIC researchers—and sham reviews (Cobe
Data Loading...
