Storm over science: predatory practices and the fight for research reliability

Abstract

Scientific publishing faces a credibility crisis driven to a very large extent by predatory journals, paper mills, and exploitative open-access (OA) practices. Structural pressures—publish-or-perish culture, mandatory OA policies, and author publication charges-driven business models—fuel the proliferation of low-quality or fraudulent research, now exacerbated by artificial intelligence-generated content. This opinion, which aligns with a growing clamour from the research community—calls for an international journal accreditation system, guided by a transparent code of conduct and enforced by funding agencies, to restore integrity, prioritize quality over quantity for professional progression, and safeguard trust in scientific communication.

Introduction

One of the great paradoxes of today’s scientific landscape lies in the coexistence of extraordinary advances in numerous fields—including, notably, microbiology—and a growing sense that something is profoundly amiss in the global scientific system. Despite the optimism inspired by fundamental breakthroughs and their application inter alia in medicine, environmental science, agriculture and industry, there is an ongoing convergence of warning signs suggesting a systemic crisis in what has traditionally been regarded as a relatively stable and peaceful domain of human endeavour (Shiffrin et al. 2018).

Among the most evident signs are the increasing difficulty of obtaining academic positions and the relentless pressure to publish in high-impact journals—or, in fact, in any journal regardless of its impact factor (IF). This situation is compounded by fierce competition for research funding and by the growing weight of managerial and bureaucratic demands, often imposed by individuals who understand neither the goals nor the needs of research. Added to this is the widening gap between the scientific labour market and the number of young researchers entering the field. One of the main beneficiaries of this struggle has been the academic publishing industry, which has experienced explosive growth.

Together, these trends are leading us into a kind of perfect storm—one of the clearest manifestations of which is the alarming rise of so-called predatory journals and publishing practices (Grudniewicz et al. 2019).

These predatory practices typically involve research journals that charge authors substantial fees while failing to provide rigorous peer review or uphold basic standards of academic quality. As a result, they publish papers that do not meet the minimum criteria for genuine scientific contributions. Predictably, once a manuscript is submitted, acceptance is virtually guaranteed after passing—if any—a superficial and rarely critical perusal by benevolent or even non-existent referees (Richardson et al. 2025). Frequent complaints about unfair peer reviews aside, the fact remains that—despite its flaws—peer review has been the most effective mechanism for maintaining the high quality of scientific publications. If this critical safeguard fails, the entire system is at risk.

The predatory landscape

Although what we now call predatory practices (Fig. 1) are not entirely new, they have intensified significantly over the past decade. For a long time, the dominant channel for disseminating primary scientific research was the legacy journal—long-established, often prestigious outlets that originated in the print era and remain under the control of major commercial publishers or learned societies. Many of these journals have enjoyed historical authority, reputation, and influence in shaping research trends. Also, their business model has traditionally been subscription-based. Some observers associate the start of the predatory phenomenon with the mid-first decade of the 2000s and the onset of new journals that proposed Open Access (OA) for the sake of making scientific results immediately available to the public, while asking authors for direct payment of publication costs to that end. But the big—if surely involuntary—trigger of the proliferation of predatory practices was the 2018 launch of Plan S (https://www.coalition-s.org/why-plan-s/), a well-intentioned initiative by major funding agencies requiring publicly funded research to be published in OA formats. Plan S also introduced the widespread practice of shifting article publication charges (APCs) to authors instead of relying on institutional subscriptions. Similar mandates were implemented in the US since the 2010s, most recently the 2022 Nelson Memo (https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-Access-Memo.pdf) (OSTP Public Access Guidance) that requires all publications from research funded by any of the US federal agencies become immediately and freely available.

Figure 1.

Mapping the predatory practices landscape. Sound scientific journals are characterized by reliable and professional peer review, focus on quality over volume. However, their APCs may vary very significantly. Even well-established journals occasionally engage in questionable practices, such as abuse of offers to edit special issues or the cascade handover of rejected manuscripts to other family journals within the same publisher’s group. Next to them lies a diverse spectrum of APC-driven mega journals, often promoted by otherwise reliable publishers which adopt a low-selectivity model, the key characteristic of which is acceptance of all technically sound research without assessment of relevance. Such journals encourage volume over depth and often let quality slide in the pursuit of APC income. Next come a large number of grey-zone journals, which do not meet the criteria of being outright predatory but exhibit clearly questionable practices e.g. weak or superficial peer review, overly broad scopes to attract more submissions, high APCs not matched by editorial quality and high acceptance rates along with fast publication times. As a result, these journals publish articles with either minimal valuable contents or conspicuous lack of rigour. But perhaps the worst category comes next: journals which are genuinely predatory. These include exploitative and often deceptive outlets which do peer review in name only, exist mainly to profit from APCs and lack editorial independence. At the end of the unreliability scale we find fraudulent fake journals and paper mills, both near-criminal operations that prey on the publish-or-perish culture.

For some time, APCs had to be subtracted from individual grants, while now many research institutions and major funding agencies have agreements with different scientific publishers for researchers to release their papers in cognate journals to comply with OA requirements. In fact, the payment of such costs is today a nearly universal obligation across public funding bodies and research institutions. These endure considerable financial burdens to meet their growing charges (see e.g. https://www.cnrs.fr/fr/actualite/frais-de-publication-nous-sommes-au-bord-du-gouffre).

Unfortunately, this pay-for-OA scenario, when combined with the intense pressure for publishing papers, including the obligation in diverse countries to meet a given number of articles for academic appointment or promotion, has opened the door to a thriving market of predatory journals and publishers (Singh 2025). These entities often masquerade as legitimate scientific outlets, yet lack the rigour and editorial integrity required for scientific credibility. In some cases, these practices have escalated into outright fraud, including fake journals and, most notably, the so-called Paper Mills—companies that publish fabricated manuscripts, often entirely written and circulated without any legitimate peer review. This troubling phenomenon (Else and Van Noorden 2021, Suchak et al. 2025, Gibney 2025) leads to an erosion of trust at the very core of scientific communication.

The rise of predatory publishing endangers the credibility of the scientific enterprise itself. When coupled with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), the situation risks becoming a full-scale hurricane. AI can now generate both research paper texts that appear scientifically sound and potentially publishable, as well as reviews of both genuine and AI-generated papers. Frighteningly, when such reviews are made not by peers but by AI, and language models are trained on repositories polluted by low-quality or fabricated data, the outcome is a dangerous dilution—if not outright destruction—of the informational value that these platforms can offer (Naddaf 2025, Suchak et al. 2025). This undermines both science and its interface with society.

While the issue is widely acknowledged and complained about within the scientific community, no concerted effort has yet emerged from the key players of the global research ecosystem to stem or reverse this trend. Attempts at blacklisting predatory journals (https://beallslist.net/) have had little effect and many of them have seen submissions increase. Obviously, these journals provide a service that is appreciated by some authors who are not discouraged by the unethical behaviour. In some cases, credit points accumulated by reviewers can later be used to offset the publication fees for their own articles in the same journals. This marketing strategy is particularly attractive to nominal reviewers who also publish as authors but cannot otherwise afford the costs of OA publication.

It should be acknowledged that not all articles appearing in these journals are inherently substandard or deceptive. Indeed, a central plank of the effort to assume a cloak of respectability is recruitment of high-quality papers from recognized authors. Frequently, early-career scientists and their principal investigators, especially those from under-resourced laboratories, resort to publishing in such venues to fulfil professional obligations, including employment retention or the formal requirements for PhD thesis submission.

The grey zone

In the OA era, many legacy journals have shifted to hybrid or fully OA models. While not exactly predatory, such journals have sometimes adopted questionable practices such as charging very high APCs, leveraging their prestige to maintain monopolistic control, or prioritizing profit over accessibility. Furthermore, established publishers now engage in actions that border on the predatory—such as cascading resubmissions, where manuscripts are shunted through a chain of journals owned by the same publisher until one with low enough editorial standards agrees to publish them. This phenomenon is not alien to the growing number of desk rejections in high IF journals who, without justification other than thematic opportunity, encourage authors to proceed to the next lower IF journal of the same publisher. While this can be helpful if managed properly, it also risks diluting editorial oversight in favour of throughput, and raises suspicion of how commercial imperatives are overtaking scientific rigour. As a consequence, some of the most conspicuous legacy journals are accused of perpetuating inequities in publishing e.g. limiting access, charging exorbitant fees, and reinforcing IF obsession. In this context, legacy journals are not predatory, but they are sometimes viewed as part of the structural problem that has enabled vicious procedures to develop.

Going towards the right of the taxonomy of the phenomenon sketched in Fig. 1, grey zone and fully predatorial platforms overdo the offer of editing special issues to young, emerging PIs who often fall in the trap of seeing this as a chance to increase their visibility and scientific profile. And in agreeing to participate in a special issue often bring on board their more established PI who—wanting to support their mentee—may reluctantly be drawn into the morass.

What can be done? Towards a journal code of conduct

The current research funding landscape and the associated academic evaluation systems are certainly part of the problem (Velicu et al. 2025). Project leaders are often required to allocate part of their budgets to publication costs, while granting agencies frequently mandate OA dissemination. This combination creates an opening for predatory journals, which exploit these requirements for profit. Similarly, evaluation of PhD theses and academic promotion dossiers often adopt metrics which reduce scientific merit to the number of publications and nominal impact indicators—criteria that predatory journals readily manipulate or fabricate. These structural pressures generate self-perpetuating cycles that normalize questionable practices, erode the integrity of scientific publishing, and divert public funds into the hands of unethical actors. Due to all this, most funding agencies channel APCs directly or indirectly to journals with predatory publication practices without imposing or involvement in any quality control. So, this is the first thing that must change. However, funding agencies may not have the expertise or the resources to do this themselves and indeed it would not be advisable that different entities of this sort develop different procedures for the same journals. We propose therefore that funders come together to create an agency cluster that develops a quality gate: an accreditation agency cluster, one that assesses the reliability and rigour of journals grounded in rigorous peer review practices and a transparent, accountable editorial handling of the submissions. Crucially, only those journals fulfilling standard quality criteria would receive accreditation; only accredited journals would be able to receive APCs by funding agencies.

What are these quality criteria? These must be developed by the research community which has the best overview of quality problems and solutions. Quality criteria would be embodied in a journal code of conduct. Various Authors of this Opinion—along with others—have already sketched how such a proposed code could look like (Timmis et al. 2025). It is of essence to stimulate discussion among those affected by predatory publishing practices, namely funding agencies, researchers and indexing services [e.g. the NIH PubMed inclusion scheme (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/addjournal/)] that, by assigning credentials, IFs, etc., also play a significant role in the problem and its solution. For the code to be effective, it cannot be optional or limited to isolated institutions. It must have transnational authority. And, while adapting to a process of accreditation would require significant cultural, operational and, above all, business model changes for some journals, there are many that already fulfil accreditation requirements requiring little change (Rudolf et al. 2025).

The agents of change

The responsibility for driving meaningful reform rests largely with research funding agencies—upheld by universities and research institutions—as they control the incentives that shape publishing behaviour. By issuing explicit guidelines on acceptable publication vehicles these agencies could curb the influence of predatory practices. The hereby pleaded code of publishing should be actively promoted and used not only to assess project outcomes and the scientific credentials of applicants, but also to hold institutions accountable for how they evaluate research productivity. Academic hiring and promotion committees must adopt these standards as well, replacing simplistic metrics such as raw publication counts or nominal IFs with a genuine assessment of scientific quality and integrity. Without such systemic measures, the current cycle of exploitative publishing practices will persist. In this context, the solution would not be to compile lists of good and bad journals—let alone publishers—but instead to implement such an accreditation system on a case-by-case basis that certifies the trustworthiness of their scientific publications. We firmly maintain that reliability must be accredited to clearly distinguish sound scientific work from questionable or poor-quality research.

But obviously shared concern alone and a bottom-up demand of an accreditation system is insufficient. What is needed is a formal mechanism for verifying trustworthy publication channels, enabling the broader community to distinguish robust science from substandard or deceptive content. The most significant challenge thus lies in securing international agreement among the world’s leading funding agencies to implement such a framework. Fortunately, we are not starting from scratch—existing models such as the global adoption of International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) references (https://www.iso.org/) for industrial practices may offer a blueprint for a journal accreditation system. Also, simple criteria like the Journal Evaluation Tool (https://shorturl.at/tkO2P) can become an extraordinary initial instrument for setting criteria and overcoming the current impasse. Finally, to ensure that the proposed code of conduct and accreditation system are not merely symbolic, a dedicated, independent body, supported by research funding agencies, must be established to monitor compliance, audit processes, and enforce the standards of scientific publishing.

Conclusion

Predatory publishing has become a systemic threat to the credibility of science. Traditional, trivial measures such as blacklists or voluntary good practices have proved insufficient to contain the spread of low-quality and even fraudulent publications, now further amplified by AI-generated content. To restore trust, a coordinated, international response led by research funding agencies is urgently needed. Central to this effort is the creation of a journal accreditation system that certifies which journals meet rigorous standards of peer review, editorial transparency, and scientific integrity. Once this is in place, public funds should cover APCs only for accredited journals. While this can solve the issue of predatory publishing practices, changes in characteristics of the research ecosystem that drive researchers to predatory journals in the first place are urgently needed. For this, a transnational code of conduct for the management of research and research careers is required, that inter alia would guide academic hiring and promotion processes and funding decisions. Finally, a dedicated independent body should monitor compliance and ensure that only reliable publications shape the scientific record. Only through such structural reforms and their cognate instruments can the scientific community reclaim the credibility, trust, and impact that underpin its contribution to society.

Author contributions

All Authors of this article provided substance and ideas to this Opinion and discussed its contents at length. VdL compiled the contributions and merge them in the current text.

Conflict of interest

None declared.

Funding

None.