Predatory journals: A threat to evidence-based science

Abstract

One of the latest threats emerged to the integrity of academic publishing is predatory journals. These journals have paved the way for low-quality articles by exploiting gold open-access publishing, threatening standards of evidence-based science. These journals lack the authentication of legitimate scholarly journals such as peer review, editing, editorial boards, editorial offices, and other editorial standards, imposing a number of new ethical issues in publishing research papers. Some of these claim to assess submissions within 72 h and digitally publish them on acceptance and receipt of the fee, showing their only motivation of procurement of evaluation and publication fees. While many of the predatory publications can be easily recognized as such by most in their respective professions, some present them as highly sophisticated and operate websites that mirror prominent mainstream journals. Even experienced professionals sometimes fail to recognize these dubious journals and join the editorial boards of these journals or submit articles, posing a big threat to publication standards and ethics. It is the utmost need of authors, i.e., scientific authors have ample opportunities for publicizing their research. However, they have to selectively target journals and publish in compliance with the established norms of publishing ethics.

Keywords

• Open-access journals
• peer-review process
• predatory nursing journals
• publication standards
• research ethics