Criteria characterizing predatory publishers | Gdańsk University of Technology

Editors and editorial team

1. The publisher is also the editor of the journal or the editor-in-chief, the members of the editorial board and the reviewing team are not precisely defined - often the entire "editorial office" consists of one or two people, therefore information about who edits and reviews a given periodical is not given at all.
2. Lack of affiliation or biographies of editors and reviewers - of course, on the basis of only this one criterion, we cannot state whether a given journal is predatory, but the lack of more detailed information about the people running it should raise suspicions.
3. There are reasons that undermine the credibility of the competences of editorial board members in the field represented by the journal.
4. Several journals have the same editorial team - if there are many journals from different scientific disciplines on the publisher's platform, but the site of each journal has the same names of editors, it means that they may not have the appropriate qualifications for such diverse periodicals.
5. Fictitious editorial members or members mentioned without their consent and knowledge - listing a famous Nobel laureate as a reviewer without their awareness and consent? Why not? This can always raise the prestige of a journal. In a situation where we suspect that the team of reviewers is false (e.g. when none of them has published any article in this journal), we can check whether ORCID or Publons have any mention of our journal on their profiles.
6. Members of the editorial board use email addresses in free domains such as gmail.com or yahoo.com, or there is no email address, only a contact form provided.

Publishing activities

1. Lack of transparency in the publishing policy - journals that care about reliability and credibility should have a detailed publication process explained on their website: guidelines for authors, but also the type and course of the review process or the rules for archiving the published materials. The lack of such information suggests that it does not exist.
2. The publisher publishes magazines whose thematic scope is too general or combines many areas, the graphic design of all titles on the site is identical - publishing a journal is a difficult and complicated process, but in the case of "predators" dozens of new titles may appear on the publisher's website overnight, with all pages of individual magazines looking the same.
3. Unprofessional appearance of the website - of course, the content of the published articles is the most important, but pages that look as if they were created in an hour should arouse our suspicions.
4. Lack of precise information on APC costs, additional costs appear during the publishing process.
5. The publisher promises the authors quick publication and a very short review process (usually associated with an additional fee) - which means the certainty of publication with little or no verification of the quality of the submitted work.
6. The publisher does not allow search engines to index the content of the publication - this may indicate that the publisher is trying to prevent duplicate or plagiarized publications being detected.
7. The publisher is engaged in spamming for new authors or editors - "aggressive marketing" in the form of numerous e-mails sent to everyone with an address in a given domain is the hallmark of quick-profit publishers.

Credibility

1. The publisher does not devote enough resources to prevent cases of plagiarism, self-plagiarism and other practices of scientific misconduct; published materials often do not meet the basic requirements for scientific publications; articles are often not subject to any correction or verification and often they are files sent by the authors - sometimes it is enough to open articles shared on site to see messy editing and numerous typing errors.
2. The name of the journal is not consistent with the journal's mission; the publisher provides false Impact Factor indicators or uses fictitious bibliometric indicators, e.g. World Impact Factor, Scientific Impact Factor, etc. In addition, databases that allegedly index a given title are often mentioned, while quick verification allows to determine its absence even in standard library catalogs.
3. The publisher does not use standards that identify the publication, such as DOI or ISSN, or uses them incorrectly; often the identifiers simply do not exist, and the journal is not registered in the ISSN database.
4. The publisher uses words such as: "network", "center", "association", "institute" in the nomenclature, while in fact it works alone, often also giving false information about the place of publication; the United States or European countries are popular, while it turns out that the editorial office of the journal is located, for example, in India.
5. The publisher copies or clearly makes the titles of their journals similar to those of others, which may lead to a mistake in selecting a predatory journal. A special case of predatory magazines are magazines that pretend to be well-known periodicals - all information about identifiers, indexation or bibliometric indicators on the website is true, while the website itself has nothing to do with the journal. One of the best-known examples is the reputable magazine Wulfenia and the site that mimics this journal: https://www.multidisciplinarywulfenia.org/.