Content area
Full text
Introduction and problem statement
Internet is flooded with electronic messages with the objective to promote the submission of an article in an academic journal, or joining the editorial board of a new "important" journal. The characteristic elements of this kind of email are easily identifiable:
* poor graphics, and text written incorrectly;
* proposal of response time very short: four to six days at the maximum;
* name of the journal is high-sounding; and
* cost for publication not high.
These simple elements should generate some suspicions about the reliability of the journal presented by email and about the impact that this type of journal has on the academic literature. Most of these emails are spam from predatory journals (Pisanski, 2013).
To explain in a better way the concept of "predatory journal" we must quote Jeffrey Beall, an American academic librarian at the University of Colorado (Denver) who in 2012 found six characteristics that should help a researcher in recognizing a predatory journal (Beall, 2013):
1. "publishes papers already published in other venues/outlets without providing appropriate credits";
2. uses language claiming to be a "leading publisher" even though the publisher may only be a start-up or a novice organization;
3. operates in a Western country, chiefly for the purpose of functioning as a vanity press for scholars in a developing country;
4. does minimal or no copy-editing;
5. publishes papers that are not academic at all, e.g. essays by laypeople or obvious pseudoscience; and
6. has a "contact us" page that only includes a web form, and the publisher hides or does not reveal its location.
As argued by many authors (Beall, 2013, 2012a, 2012b, 2014; Dyrud, 2014; Pisanski, 2013), all the journals reviewed in the "Beall's List" () have some indication about a fee payment for publishing an article.
The journals were all founded after the year 2007, and most of them were born in 2011. This period agrees with Beall's recent literature (Beall, 2013).
As stated by Beall, the names of the journals are usually pretentious and often show the prefix "International Journal of [...]". In a volume of a predatory journal, you can find articles with aims not closely related with the alleged aim of the journal (Beall, 2012a, 2012b)....