Hijacked journals, hijacked web-sites, journal phishing, misleading metrics, and predatory publishing: actual and potent
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COMMENTARY
Hijacked journals, hijacked web-sites, journal phishing, misleading metrics, and predatory publishing: actual and potential threats to academic integrity and publishing ethics Mehdi Dadkhah1 • Tomasz Maliszewski2 • Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva3
Accepted: 23 May 2016 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Introduction Academic research has always faced challenges associated with assuring its quality and seeking optimal ways of representing results. Conducting a high level of research and selecting a suitable target publisher and journal require careful attention. The choice of publishing venue has been expanded by the open access (OA) movement, spurring additional scientific activity. The benefits of OA, which consist, generally speaking, in making the results of empirical research and/or the results of intellectual work available almost immediately and to a wide audience, have also introduced a number of threats and challenges to the academic world. On one hand, the number of opportunities to publish has increased significantly. On the other hand, the traditional system of peer review that was always
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s12024-016-9785-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Mehdi Dadkhah [email protected] Tomasz Maliszewski [email protected] Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva [email protected] 1
Independent Scientist, Information Science and Publication Ethics Scholar, Isfahan, Iran
2
Department of Social Sciences, Pomeranian University in Słupsk, ul. Bohatero´w Westerplatte 64, 76-200 Słupsk, Poland
3
P. O. Box 7, Miki-Cho Post Office, 3011-2, Ikenobe, Kagawa-ken 761-0799, Japan
perceived to exert a level of control by the academic community with respect to the quality of publications, has become less strict and rigorous, or has shown flaws. Collectively, a researcher faces a number of challenges when wanting to publish in an OA journal. This paper focuses on some of the threats to the integrity of the expanding OA movement, specifically hijacked journals, hijacked websites, journal phishing, misleading metrics, and predatory publishing.
Science and academic integrity are under threat The integrity of science and academic publishing are at risk if measures to curtail fraud and corruption are not urgently implemented. Issues such as expanding networks of ‘‘predatory’’ open access journals (POAJs) [1–3], fake peer reviews [4], and increasing cases of detected self-reviewed papers [5], the use of fake e-mails to complete pseudo-peer review [6], imperfect traditional peer review [7], editorial corruption and cronyism (e.g., Archives of Biological Sciences) [8], biased peer review that favors authors with a famed affiliation (i.e., guest authorship) [9], unauthorized co-authors, namely ghost, honorary, and gift authors [10], obtaining the names and addresses of authors and members of editorial boards of fake POAJs through bogus conferences [11], and other instances of actual or possible deceit, f
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