The term “predatory publishing” refers to the exploitative and deceptive nature of predatory journals that are published for profit with no regard for academic scholarship. This article discusses the growth and drivers of predatory publishing, and the impact thereof on higher education internationally.

Despite the widespread belief—and perhaps hope—that academics generally behave ethically when publishing the results of their research and scholarship to wider audiences, various forms of unethical and fraudulent publication behavior have manifested themselves over the years. The norm of “disinterestedness” described by sociologist Robert Merton in 1942 expresses the idea that scientists should work only for the benefit of science. Commitment to this ideal would rule out the pursuit of research for other goals such as personal enrichment, self-promotion, or personal influence.

Unfortunately, as many studies have shown, not all scientists and academics necessarily subscribe to these norms. Various manifestations contrary to these ideals are well-documented in publication practices such as plagiarism and self-plagiarism, institutionalized bias against women authors in scholarly publishing, the gaming of peer-review practices through fake reviewers and reviews, use of ghost authors and—our focus—the advent of predatory publishing in academia.

The paper reconstructs the genesis and development of predatory publishing, discusses the main drivers behind this development, and concludes with some observations about its wider impact in higher education.

Origins and Subsequent Developments

The term “predatory publishing” is usually attributed to Jeffrey Beall, a librarian formerly at the University of Colorado in Denver, United States. He coined the term “predatory” in 2010, and the same year established a website and blog, which earned him the reputation as the unofficial “watchdog” of predatory publishing. He took down the website in 2017 due to personal threats that he had been receiving. Beall’s lists have been archived by an anonymous contributor, while companies such as Cabells continue to document what they deem to be predatory publishers and journals.

In a more systematic publication on the topic published in Nature in 2012, Beall provided a more formal description of what is meant by predatory publishing: “Then came predatory publishers, which publish counterfeit journals to exploit the open-access model in which the author pays. These predatory publishers are dishonest and lack transparency. They aim to dupe researchers, especially those inexperienced in scholarly communication. They set up websites that closely resemble those of legitimate online publishers and publish journals of questionable and downright low quality. Many purport to be headquartered in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada or Australia but really hail from India, Nigeria or Pakistan. Some predatory publishers spam researchers, soliciting manuscripts but failing to mention the required author fee.”

Beall’s pioneering work triggered a burgeoning worldwide scholarship on the meaning and prevalence of predatory publishing. Much of this work can be seen as an extension of Beall’s attempts to describe the scientific and geographical extent of “predatory” publishing. Despite this, for a long time no consensus definition of the key characteristics of a predatory journal was available.

In April 2019, the Canadian Centre for Journalology convened a global Predatory Journals Summit. A consensus definition was drafted by academics and practitioners attending the summit and was subsequently published in Nature: “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.”

This definition captures most of the main characteristics of “predatory” highlighted by previous authors: the fact that such journals prioritize financial profit at the expense of scholarship; typically falsify or misrepresent information and key metrics about their journals; do not adhere to good editorial/publications practices; lack transparency in business practices. This definition provides a firm basis to inform current and future debates about what we mean when we use the term “predatory.”

The Main Causes and Drivers

There appear to be two main drivers that led to the widespread prevalence of predatory and other questionable publication practices in modern-day academics.

The first relates to the opportunities for fraudulent and unethical practices that became possible through digital publishing in the 1990s as well as the subsequent open access (OA) movement. It has become much easier to misuse the scholarly publishing system for one’s own self-interest and profit. It is not that the emergence of open access directly resulted in the appearance of predatory publishers or journals, but it certainly provided the material opportunities to do so. All or most of the characteristics of “predatory” discussed in this paper, such as the creation of fake journals, fake metrics, fake websites and editorial boards, and so on, have only become possible because of the internet and the subsequent migration from print to electronic journals.

The co-occurrence of the OA movement and predatory publishing does not by itself explain the speed and increasing geographical footprint of such questionable publishing practices. The second driver that clearly underpins and continues to fuel such practices is found in a culture of performance management that pervades every aspect of our academic culture. This is not merely the reintroduction of an older form of the “publish or perish” culture that has been around for decades but is the widespread expansion of new public management ideas in the form of new metrics for academic performance appraisal. James Wilsdon referred to this in 2015 as “the metric tide” at universities. In essence, the issue is about the convergence of earlier forms of managerialism at postsecondary institutions with more recent developments in bibliometrics and altmetrics, as well as the inappropriate application of metrics such as the journal impact factor (JIF) and the h-index in hiring and promotion of academic staff.

Academic performance or success is regularly equated with some score or metric, more specifically, with metrics that prioritize counts, outputs, and numbers. Qualitative aspects of academic work, which cannot be reduced to simple measures such as publication counts, h-indices, or JIF, are conveniently ignored.

In a study conducted in 2018 by the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST), South African academics were asked to list the factors that they believe are most relevant to them when appointed on tenure or promoted. Perhaps not surprisingly, the three highest-rated reasons by the respondents were: publishing in journals indexed in either the Web of Science or Scopus; supervising and “delivering” postgraduate students; and publishing in high-impact journals. It was equally interesting that doing community engagement and providing service to the university were the lowest-rated factors!

The Impact of Predatory Publishing

When the impact of the OA movement is combined with an academic culture that prioritizes quantitative metrics, and incentive schemes are introduced that reward academics for publishing as many articles as possible with no consideration of quality or integrity, it is not surprising that the good intentions of such incentives lead to perverse consequences.

Where it becomes clear that academics at certain universities consistently engage in unscrupulous forms of unethical research and publication practices—whether these are predatory publishing, the deliberate pursuit of publication and citation cartels, assignment of fake authorship, or otherwise—the reputation of these universities will increasingly become tainted. Furthermore, tolerance toward such practices by university management will lead to an erosion of trust in the standing and reputation of the university, not only by the rest of academia but also by other stakeholders (alumni, funders) and ultimately the general public. Unless academics remain vigilant about these kinds of behavior and act decisively to root them out, public confidence and trust in science will wane to the long-term detriment of the scientific enterprise.

Johann Mouton is professor at the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology, and director of the DSTI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Scientometrics and STI Policy, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. E-mail: [email protected].

Marthie van Niekerk is centre manager at both Centres. E-mail: [email protected].