Research support: Publishing: Predatory journals and publishers

"Predatory publishers or journals are those which charge authors a fee for publication with no intention of providing the expected services – such as editorial or peer review – in return. Charging a fee is a legitimate business model, but the publisher should be providing a good publishing service in return.  Authors, realising that they have submitted their paper to a questionable publisher, can find they are charged a large fee if they want to withdraw their article."(https://thinkchecksubmit.org/resources/about-predatory-publishing/)

"Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors while only superficially checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. The rejection rate of predatory journals is low, but seldom zero. The phenomenon of "open access predatory publishers" was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship.

Predatory publishers are so regarded because scholars are tricked into publishing with them, although some authors may be aware that the journal is poor quality or even fraudulent but publish in them anyway. New scholars from developing countries are said to be especially at risk of being misled by predatory publishers. According to one study, 60% of articles published in predatory journals receive no citations over the five-year period following publication." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_publishing)

Characteristics of predatory publishers

"Recognizing common characteristics of predatory publishers can help to avoid them. Complaints that are associated with predatory open-access publishing include:

• Accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control, including hoax and nonsensical papers.
• Notifying academics of article fees only after papers are accepted.
• Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or serve on editorial boards.
• Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission, and not allowing academics to resign from editorial boards.
• Appointing fake academics to editorial boards.
• Mimicking the name or web site style of more established journals.
• Making misleading claims about the publishing operation, such as a false location.
• Using ISSNs improperly.
• Citing fake or non-existent impact factors but not listed in Journal Citation Reports.
• Boasting about being "indexed" by academic social networking sites (like ResearchGate) and standard identifiers (like ISSNs and DOIs) as if they were prestigious or reputable bibliographic databases.
• Not indexed in major databases like Scopus and DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
• Favoritism and self-promotion in peer review.

Predatory publishers have also been compared to vanity presses" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_publishing)

• Editorial boards may comprise individuals from a single institution or country

PREDATORY CONFERENCES

Predatory conferences exist to make money. Revenue-generating companies exploit attendees and presenters as well as charge high registration fees. The motive is not scholarly advancement. 

The Himmelfarb Health Sciences library provides a very comprehensive check list to help ascertain if a conference you are interested in may be predatory. A site called Think Check Attend provides similar guidelines.