An Exploratory Survey of the Suspicious Open Access Journals

Abstract

This paper describes the results of a survey of possibly predatory open access journals. Based on Jeffrey Beall’s compilations of predatory publishers and standalone journals, the study identified 891 publishers and 7,726 journals with content at the end of January 2015, of which 1,989 journals were published by twelve mega publishers that had published over one hundred journal titles. The distributions of all journals versus journals from the mega publishers by paper quantity, journal debut year/journal age, and subject were systematically examined and compared. It was found that, at the time of this study, nearly half of the publishers had only one non-empty journal. Nearly 2/3 of the 7,726 non-empty journals had published only 50 or less papers, and half of them were debuted within two years. As high as 90% of the journals targeted science, technology, and medicine (STM), and the three domains had roughly equal shares of the journals. A sample of 11,419 articles was further drawn from the journals with more than 100 papers and those with 10 or less papers. The analysis of the first authors showed that India, United States and Nigeria were the top three contributors to suspicious journals; they together constituted approximately 50% of the sample.

Keywords

• open access journals
• predatory publishing
• scholarly communication