Library Guides: Scholarly Publishing: Avoiding predatory and unethical publishers

Avoiding predatory, unethical, and low-quality publishers

Predatory and unethical practices can be found across a wide range of journals, book publishers, and conferences. They can be found in new or long-running titles, open access or traditional (closed) publications, those that charge publishing fees and those that don't, and in journals with any impact quartile.

Predatory publishers usually prioritise making money over disseminating high-quality research. Other low-quality, unethical publishers might seek to present misinformation, disinformation, or propaganda under the guise of peer-reviewed scholarship.

It can be helpful to recognise publishing practices as falling on a spectrum between fraudulent at one end and quality at the other:

The InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) and UNESCO Open Science Toolkit outline some of the typical markers of fraudulent, low-quality, and quality practices. We have summarised and built on these below.

Fraudulent	Low-quality	Quality
Poor or non-existent peer review Unrealistically rapid service Plagiarising content from reputable outlets Use researchers' names without their permission (identity theft) Fake editorial or advisory boards Lie about their credentials (impact factors, indexing, etc.) Have hijacked and now mimic a quality journal.	Low-quality peer review Aggressive or indiscriminate solicitation (emails, messages, etc.) Inactive editorial or advisory boards Editors or board members without relevant qualifications in the field Lack of focus, publishing content beyond the stated scope of the publication Poor organisation and a lack of professionalism Solicitation emails are full of mistakes Exaggerate their impact and prestige Promised services are poor or lacking	Thorough peer review Strong and well-qualified editorial and advisory boards Transparent and robust policies to ensure integrity Clear and up-front about costs (such as open access fees) Transparent policies for retractions Quick to take action when challenged Research quality and integrity are prioritised over financial profit

Note that a publisher may demonstrate behaviours at different points along the spectrum and it will be up to individuals to determine whether they are comfortable with the final risk assessment.

Image and table adapted from IAP, Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences (2022), and UNESCO & AIP, Identifying predatory academic journals and conferences (2023), each licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Think. Check. Submit.

The Think. Check. Submit. website provides a helpful framework for evaluating publisher quality. It provides checklists, tools, and other resources that aim to promote integrity in scholarly publishing and empower researchers to make evidence-based assessments of quality.

The website provides separate checklists and resources for evaluating journals and evaluating books and book chapters.

Cabells Predatory Reports

Cabells Predatory Reports is a tool that uses expansive and robust criteria to evaluate journals. When a journal has behavioral indicators that violate these criteria, Cabells provides detail of the violation and categorises it as either minor, moderate, or severe.

Access Cabells Journalytics

Avoiding predatory conferences

Predatory and low-quality conferences lack the academic rigour of quality conferences, being more interested in making money than showcasing quality research. These conferences may undertake aggressive solicitation (spamming you with emails) ,or having little or no peer review of published proceedings.

The Think. Check. Attend. initiative provides a checklist with questions to ask of a conference before deciding to attend or submit your work.

The Australian Government's Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) has also created an A to Z list of the elements of predatory conferences (PDF, 2024).