Good, Bad, and In Between

A Practical Guide to avoiding predatory open access publishers

Damien Belvèze

damien.belveze@univ-rennes.fr

Université de Rennes

2026-06-09

Data management support for researchers
training sessions (data management, identifiers, reproducibility)
Data management plans
Data curation on ‘Recherche Data Gouv’ repository

outline

Predators and Imposters
Between light and dark grey : assessment criteria
White lists and blacklists
how to starve crooks and thieves

1. predators and imposters

Elsevier has built up a war chest with $1.17 billion in net revenues, representing a 38% increase in sales.

“A 37–40 percent margin places Elsevier alongside Apple, Google, and Coca-Cola. Few industries rival that kind of profitability, especially not in sectors like publishing or academia.” (source : https://publishingstate.com/how-much-profit-did-elsevier-make-in-2024/2025/)

Researchers depend on these publishing companies for the quality assessment of their work.

As a raw material, they yield for nothing the product of their public funded research, with which those companies will make extravagant profits by siphoning off university libraries’ finances.

Or they will require research teams to pay 2 or 3 thousand dollars for so-called Article processing charges (APC) in order to make their publication open access in their journals.

In most of the cases, big publishing companies will make profit from both publication costs and subscriptions sold at a premium to libraries ( therefore are they called hybrid publishers)

Elsevier, Springer, Nature, all predate public money by forcing scholars and their institutions to pay massive amounts of money either to publish or to read scientific papers, while the real added value, peer review process is massively done by researchers for free.

They are predators, but not impersonators : in majority the papers that are submitted to these stakeholders are reviewed accordingly to scientific standards.

about Erik Ergstrom see Relx group Annual Remuneration Report

since 2019, RELx, Reed Elsevier and Lexis parent company, has an agreement with ICE boarder patrol ,US Immigration and Custom Enforcement, to provide customers personal data ICE relies on for tracking, raiding, detaining, and deporting immigrant –>

(source : https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Thomson-Reuters-RELX_v4.pdf)

in the following slides, Poap will stand for “Predatory Open Access Publishers”

a light definition

Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices

📓¹

What consequences for Academics?

a spot in the curriculum vitae
it could be difficult to withdraw the publication and recover one’s rights to publish it elsewhere
public money wasted (since no quality was added to the original work)
POAP undermine researchers confidence in publication system as well public confidence in science

1. POAPs are a perversion of an open access model

Figure 2: Gold vs Green

The DOAJ specifies wether APC for a given journal will be paid (70% of publishers demand no fee at all), and the amount of this APC

Rise of APC model = rise of predatory open access publishers

Figure 3

2. Between light and dark grey: Assessment criteria

“POAPs ask for cheaper APCs”

Why APC lower than 150 euros would be distinctive of predatory practice? 📓²
Some real imposters ask for great amount of money
APC price cannot serve as reliable criterion to assess the legitimacy of a journal
APC, whether they are proportionate to peer review quality or not undermine public confidence in science : “if you are rich enough, you will be published whatever the quality of your work”
The cost of APCs is not an excellent criterion for distinguishing between submissions based on the rigor of their peer review.

“POAPs lack of transparency about the fees they actually charge”

submission fees
illustration fees
All fees that will be charged should be clearly displayed on a page for authors. if it is not so: behave with great caution !

“POAPs does not use standard Open Access Licences”

Bronze OA (=accessible but not really OA)
Some legitimate journals declare they will attribute an open licence on publications, but with no indication of the licence (CC:by or what?)
not a meaningfull criterion to spot POAP

why bronze OA is bad for dissemination of knowledge :

“Without a license, articles are free to read, but can’t be redistributed or reused, for example, in presentations or course material, says Heather Piwowar, co-founder of the open science not-for-profit ImpactStory, who led the analysis. Without explicit permission, they also can’t be mined by computer software” (source : https://www-nature-com.passerelle.univ-rennes.fr/nature-index/news/bronze-open-access-supersedes-green-and-gold)

“Similar to licence terms, even the criterion of clear declaration of the OA mode lacks any foundation because this mode of publishing is apparent from publication conditions in the instructions for authors. This criterion disqualifies even reputable journals such as the Journal of the Czech and Slovak Societies of Pathology, where instead of a clear declaration of OA mode, the journal only mentions ‘the original articles […] are published […] as Open Access articles’”

See 📓³

“POAPs send spams to researchers”

POAPs display or actually achieve very short review times.

But wait : what is a normal duration for a peer-reviewing process ?
what takes so much time : to find a specialist who can dedicate a bit of their time to the review or the reviewing process itself
anonymous peer-reviewing, lack of financial incentive, the usual burden of academics who have a lot of things to do, more urgent things, may lower the motivation and the attention of the reviewers.
if open peer reviewing was standard, the time to achieve this task would not be a problem.
No consensus on this criterion

What takes a long time in a normal review process is not the review time itself (< 1 day📓⁴), but the time it takes for an overworked researcher to find those few hours for review or to identify a specialist.

“Equally questionable is the length of the review process based on the analysis of its usual duration (Nguyen et al., 2015; Wicherts, 2016) because, while writing a review may only take a couple of hours, the whole length of the peer review process is also influenced by searching for a suitable peer reviewer or by the fact that the reviewer and editor are otherwise occupied (Huisman & Smits, 2017; McGlinchey, 2017; Schmidt, Ross-Hellauer, van Edig, & Moylan, 2018). Therefore, a peer review lasting only a couple of days cannot be automatically regarded as dubious editorial work.” 📓³

“POAP boast themselves with dubious metrics”

Even legitimate Clarivate’s Impact Factor is not a good indicator of a publication’s quality
Impact Factor may be alleged while the journal is not indexed any more in the JCR (or never has been)
false metrics are forged to deceive the potential authors (> Skopus)
existing bad metrics are cited as if they were reputable (> Copernicus) 📓⁵
a quite reliable criterion !

“POAPs abuse self-citation”

tendency to self-citation in order to raise Impact Factor
self-citations practices do not only affect POAP, legitimate journals tend to abuse of this kind of citations
not a very reliable criterion

“POAPs publish too many special issues”

It is true that this practice first appeared among the usual suspects (MDPI, Frontiers). But it is spreading to all OA publishers (see Biomed Central Journals). The frequency of deliveries is no longer really suited to scientific communication on the web.

even reputable publishers put pressure on editorial boards to make them publish more in order to get more APC paid

Academic publishing by Dr Glaucomflecken https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F9gzQz1Pms

members of tan editorial board refuse to lower their quality criteria in order to publish more articles
they resign from Springer
they look for support by non-for-profit organisations
they re-create the journal as a diamond OA journal
one among many examples : https://www.openlibhums.org/news/943/
big publishing company’s greed push researchers toward Diamond OA model

POAPs impersonate les legitimate publishers

very close titles (but is creativity possible on very specific topics?)
same titles and graphic identity to deceive reseachers : what are highjacking predatory publishers?
same exact title: high-jacking, close title: maybe, maybe not, we should go deeper to decide

Préventive Medicine

The activity provides two links; these two links lead to the home pages of two newspapers with the same name (“Sylwan”) and more or less the same design. One of these newspapers is reliable, the other is trying to copy the former; which is which?

10.4103/PMRR.PMRR_226_24 Preventive Medicine Review & Research ; listed in the DOAJ: 10,000 Indian rupees, or approximately €100 per published article (compared to the $3,910 indicated on the home page of the journal Preventive Medicine at Elsevier); The Indian journal is supported by a non-profit foundation (Foundation for People Centric Health System).
10.36648/2572-5483.6.11.121 iMedPub : faux nez d’OMICS (cf Wikipedia, et l’Actualité )

Sylwan

“https://sylwan-journal.pl/apex/f?p=SYLWAN:WSKAZOWKI::::” is the legitimate journal’s URL, while http://www.sylwan.ibles.org/guide.html was provided bu the predator. Quite often, it is useful to visit the Wikipedia page dedicated to these newspapers (if there is one). In this case, the English Wikipedia has an article on Sylwan. In the page history, there is a link to a page archived in the Internet Archive, which documents the attempt to hijack the Sylwan newspaper.

the term was coined in 2012 by an iranian researcher, Mehrdad Jalalian 📓⁶

usurpation of the graphic identity of a reputable journal by a journal that wants to attract either readers or authors (as in the case of Predatory open access publishers) this does not happen only to academic journals but also to media outlets as well (see ABC news, which impersonates the brand and mimicks ABC, the famous American News media’s graphical identity.

acceptance rate and retraction rate

Acceptance rate : MDPI > 41-50% of all submitted articles are accepted / others > 15-20%
Retraction rate : MDPI > 213 papers cited in the retraction database (but comparable retraction rates among better-regarded publishers)

📓³

“editorial boards are sometimes fake, or researchers, do not know that they are a member of these boards ; affiliations are forged sometimes”

register researchers without asking their opinion on editorial boards
invent far-fetched affiliations (University of Brittany, University of Paris 16, etc.)
be careful, it is not easy to know the real affiliation of a board member to the alleged institution (role of ORCID)
When identity theft can be established, it is definitely a predatory journal

“POAP conduct low quality peer-reviewing processes with no additional value but with AI agents”

even reputable journals tend nowadays to assist reviewers with AI tools
peer-reviewing conducted by AI assistants is not real peer-reviewing : chatGPT is not your peer !.
are we going to embrace a world in which the same papers that were forged by AI will be reviewed by other AI?
“If we start automating reviews, as reviewers, this sends the message that providing reviews is either a box to check or a line to add on the resume.” 📓⁸

Is MDPI a POAP ?

✅ MPDI publish some good papers in some reputable journals
✅ 18 journals have an impact factor greater than 4 which is sometimes considered as a proof of quality
✅ EU funders sometimes recommand publishing in some of the MDPI journals

👎 MDPI engages in intensive spamming
👎 inflation of special issues (see above)
👎 Some editors had to resign because they refused to bow to pressure from MDPI to lower the quality standards of their journals.

📓⁹

3. white lists and black lists

Beall’s list

2008-2017 was closed due to threats of legal actions
maintained only by one person, more vulnerable to pressure
subjective criteria
biases thoroughly documented (anti-OA, pro-Big publising)
discriminatory toward researchers from the Global South

On the discriminatory, potentially racist nature of Jeffrey Beall’s judgements: Excerpt from an interview quoted by: notebook:¹⁰ “Look, when I discover a new publisher from Nigeria, I admit I am more suspicious than I would be were the publisher from, for example, the Vatican.” Beall described Scielo, the Spanish- and Portuguese-language archiving and publishing infrastructure, as a “publishing slum” (publishing favela)📓²

In academia, this suspicion towards publishers from the Global South extends to reviewers and authors:

Studies have shown that submissions by authors from the Global South are evaluated more harshly than submissions from researchers affiliated with institutions in the North.

see also Reggie Raju on LCP blog: > “I believe that the greatest negative impact of the list and its lingering vestiges is the psychological damage – this is a major hammer blow to researchers from the global south who are eager to become net contributors to the world’s knowledge production”

📓¹¹

See also : as a consequence, some papers published in POAP are “often cited because they are the sole data sources on various semi-peripheral countries and their contexts” 📓¹²

POAP, a concept that protects the dominant positions held by Western Corporations ?

What the concept of predatory journals actually reveals is the deep inequalities between the scientific working conditions in countries close to the “centre” of global science, such as the UK and US, and those on its periphery

📓¹²

Cabell’s list

not enough transparency
not enough updated (but which black or white list could be really uptodate) ?
too expensive for the service offered

what is the purpose of black lists?

for many authors, there are not ethicaly grounded and their benefit is null 📓²
they are sensitive on a geopolitical point of view 📓¹³
They are based on standards which for some of them are questionable to assess the quality of a journal, and would require a high level of investment, unreachable for the competitors from the Global South (see for instance archiving papers).
they are way too expensive
Some black lists exist that are not commercial and are crowd-sourced” : highjacking journals checker, Predatory journals
White lists (DOAJ) are better (at least they have less negative side effects) but remain uncomplete and fail to be updated
we think that we should instead educate the Academia to good publishing practices
That’s what checklists are for : Think, check, submit, Compass to Publish

4. how to starve crooks and thieves?

We should drastically change the publishing ecosystem

POAP phenomenon draws its root from the capitalist nature of main stakeholders
researchers from low-income countries particularly suffer from the APC system, but so do researchers from western countries to some extent
scientific communities need to reclaim control to their production
invitation to researchers to build Diamond Journals and infrastructures rather than perform reviews for Big Publishers
spread open peer review to make it transparent and possible to assess 📓¹⁴ /¹⁵
assess quality over quantity (refrain from the “publish or perish* assessment model -> DORA)
train young researchers on good publishing practices
support journals that publish negative data

Why do researchers sometimes consciously choose to publish in POA journals?

Young Global South researchers think they are not enough experienced or equiped (see below) to publish in traditional journals 📓¹⁶
Predatory open access publishers publish whatever you submit, so they make it possible to publish negative data
APC are far cheaper than in traditional journals
In some countries, PhD students need to publish their paper before their defense (race against the clock)
The quantity of publications is still too often considered at the expense of their quality (publish or perish). Academia still favors quantity over quality.

unbalance in training and accessible infrastructures between Global North and South

By “equiped”, we mean that researchers are poorer than their colleagues from their western counterparts, and they have more teaching charges and less time to lead research projects, they also lack of administrative support, and cannot rely on uptodate training on data management and use of research software 📓¹⁷ (see note)

Many countries, especially low income countries, have limited access to the infrastructure needed to conduct research such as intermittent electricity supplies, poor technical infrastructure (such as internet connectivity and technical support), sub-standard research training, lack of expert data management support, lack of access to the published literature, and to the latest research software (Bezuidenhout et al., 2017). Low level connectivity issues effectively limit access even where material is ostensibly open (Shanahan & Bezuidenhout, 2022). Researchers are also time poor, because of the pressure to teach and limited administrative support. As a result of these issues, researchers may lack confidence in the quality of their work and trust in international systems of communication and research assessment, which typically do not account for such obstacles and the inequity in resources available to different research groups (Leonelli 2018)

Sharing resources to support journal creation in emerging countries

Ensure that quality criteria do not hinder the emergence of actors in Southern countries
DOAJ Ambassadors in the Global South (📓¹⁸ ) to end cognitive injustice between North and South
Raise participation of researchers from Global South to filter out publications in DOAJ

compass to publish

Compass to publish

helps you to ask the good questions about a journal (-> weighted diagnostic)
maintained by the University of Liege
available in english

Try C2P

previous tests on AJADD

figures

illustrations

figure	source et crédits
Figure 1	Research Professional News
?@fig-shark	Shark, by yosuke muroya, CC-by-nc
Figure 4	portion de la couverture de l’album “Entre Gris clair et Gris foncé” de Jean-Jacques Goldman, 1987
Figure 2	Perrin, S. (2022, novembre 30). Beware predatory publishers!
Figure 3	Perrin, S. (2022, novembre 30). Beware predatory publishers!
Figure 5	Sarka Erben Johansson’s presentation on MDPI at the MUNI University 5/09/2023
Figure 9	source: Anonymous on Twitter based on Illustration by David Parkins
Figure 6	Ansede, M. (2023, octobre 31). Public funds being swallowed up by scientific journals with dubious articles.
Figure 7	Michaela Strinzel, Anna Severin, Katrin Milzow, Matthias Egger, 2019 Blacklists and Whitelists To Tackle Predatory Publishing: a Cross-Sectional Comparison and Thematic Analysis
Figure 8	Author, A. (2020, septembre 28). Jeffrey Beall à une conférence de 2016 organisée parZBW MediaTalk, cc-by 4.0.

content reused

The predatory letter activity is an english translation of the activity that was originaly designed by Olivier Poirier (UQTR), Valérie Levasseur (UQAC), Félix de la Durantaye (ENAP) and Valérie Bourdeau (UQ) (source).

software used for this presentation

Most part of the software used for this presentation are “libre” software

Quarto 1.3.450
VScode 1.8.0
Rstudio 2023.03.0
H5p
Digitale’s H5P editor (logiquiz) and board (digiboard)

References

Grudniewicz, A. et al. Predatory journals: No definition, no defence. Nature 576, 210–212 (2019).

Teixeira da Silva, J. A. & Tsigaris, P. What value do journal whitelists and blacklists have in academia? The Journal of Academic Librarianship 44, 781–792 (2018).

Kratochvíl, J., Plch, L., Sebera, M. & Koriťáková, E. Evaluation of untrustworthy journals: Transition from formal criteria to a complex view. Learned Publishing 33, 308–322 (2020).

Huisman, J. & Smits, J. Duration and quality of the peer review process: The author’s perspective. Scientometrics 113, 633–650 (2017).

Delgado, A. Fraudulent and false metric indexes. A scam for publishers and authors. (2016).

Abalkina, A. Predatory vs hijacked journals: A commentary to “A ‘Trojan horse’ in the reference lists: Citations to a hijacked journal in SSCI-indexed marketing journals.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 102798 (2023) doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102798.

Partnership, T. I. Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences - full report. (2022).

Poisot, T. Here is a revised version of your review with improved clarity. (2025).

Crosetto, P. Is MDPI a predatory publisher? (2021).

10.

Teixeira da Silva, J. A. & Kimotho, S. G. Signs of divisiveness, discrimination and stigmatization caused by jeffrey beall’s “predatory” open access publishing blacklists and philosophy. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 48, 102418 (2022).

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Raju, R. Predatory publishing from a global south perspective. (2018).

12.

Partnership, T. I. Combatting predatory academic journals and conferences - full report. (2022).

13.

Kulczycki, E. We won’t defeat predatory journals by making a list of them. Times Higher Education (THE) (2023).

14.

Siler, K. There is no black and white definition of predatory publishing. (2020).

15.

Siler, K., Vincent-Lamarre, P., Sugimoto, C. R. & Larivière, V. Predatory publishers’ latest scam: Bootlegged and rebranded papers. Nature 598, 563–565 (2021).

16.

Boukacem-Zeghmouri, C., Pergola, L. & Castaneda, H. Profiles, motives and experiences of authors publishing in predatory journals: OMICS as a case study. (2023).

17.

Group, C. D. E. W. et al. POLICY BRIEF: Data ethics and structural inequities in science. (2024) doi:10.5281/zenodo.10933602.

18.

Olyhoek, T., Porrett, B. & Mitchell, D. The DOAJ ambassador programme: An example project for promoting cognitive justice in the global south. in ELPUB 2018 (eds. Chan, L. & Mounier, P.) vols. Connecting the Knowledge Commons: From Projects to Sustainable Infrastructure (ElPub, 2018).