During the preparation of the paper titled “Are We as Otorhinolaryngologists Aware of the Danger of Predatory Journals?” which was published in our journal last year, I started to collect the emails sent by the Otorhinolaryngology (ORL) journals which insisted me to submit manuscripts or demanded to be an editorial board member of their journals (1). My intention was to examine the journals in these emails and to identify those which were suspected of being predatory. Learning that Turkey was the third country after India and Nigeria that publish the most manuscripts in an article investigating the publications in predatory journals, I decided it was time to do this research (2). My aim was to determine the ORL journals which were likely to be predatory in the emails sent to me and to see our situation among the countries that publish in these journals.
I started to study the web sites of the ORL journals which demanded articles via e-mails in approximately a 17-month-period. In order to understand if a journal is a predatory or a possible predatory one, I took into account the criteria mentioned in the articles published before (3–7).
As a result of my evaluation with these criteria, I have identified 21possible predatory journals (Table 1). The most striking features in these journals were:
Table 1.
Possible predatory Otorhinolaryngology journals
Web sites of these journals are very simple.
Most of the journals do not have international standard serial number (ISSN), and there is no digital object identifier (DOI) number in the articles of many journals.
While most journals appear to be based in the United States, the domain names are based in India.
In almost all of the journals, the aim is to be presented with extremely inadequate, short and cliche sentences.
Some journal names have great similarities with the names of journals in important indexes.
There are often the same individuals with the same photos in the journal editorial boards and most of them do not have an editor in chief.
There are a few or no articles in the archives of most of the journals or a regular publication period is not specified.
There is not enough information about online article submission and peer-review systems in almost all journals.
The period between the submission of the manuscript to the journal and the acceptance of the manuscript to be published is sometimes only even one week, and it takes only one day to publish it after acceptance.
None of the journals are registered to the Open Access Journal Directory (DOAJ).
In these journals introducing themselves as open access, the article publishing fees range from 250 to 1800 USD, while the information about the fees is difficult to reach or unreachable.
Almost all of the publishers are included in Beall’s list as suspicious and possible predators (7).
None of the journals are included in the indexes. Some of them show Google Scholar, iThenticate and Crossref, as some indexes.
An online chat system that is not usual for professional journals is found on web pages of most of them.
A large number of e-mails including invitations to submit articles or join editorial boards are sent by these journals.
I scanned the archives of the 21 ORL possible predatory journals between November 23–26, 2018 and recorded the countries where the articles were sent from without limiting the years. In seven of these journals, no articles had been published yet and the number of articles published in each of the eight journals was less than 10. I showed the first 10 countries from which 187 articles I identified in Table 2. In this ranking, while Turkey was the third country after India which is a similar finding of Demir’s (2) research, the only difference was that the United States took the first place.
Table 2.
The 10 most publishing countries in possible predatory Otorhinolaryngology journals
| 1 | United States of America (33) |
| 2 | India (20) |
| 3 | Turkey (15) |
| 4 | Japan (13) |
| 5 | Brazil (12) |
| 6 | United Kingdom (12) |
| 7 | Italy (9) |
| 8 | China (7) |
| 9 | Egypt (7) |
| 10 | Mexico (6) |
| Others (53) |
After the development of open access journals, predatory journals have become a great danger for the rapid pollution of science. The only purpose in these journals is to get a certain amount of money from authors. As a result, with the payment of the desired amount, it is possible to publish all kinds of articles which are not subject to any peer-review and which may have serious scientific mistakes or ethical misconduct. In addition, predatory journals can cause serious problems or injustice in our country where academic promotion is enabled only by online examination of the candidate’s publications.
In this limited research, only a small group of journals which request insistently submission of manuscripts or being an editorial board member via emails was studied. In fact, the number of predatory journals is very high and it is not possible to know the exact number. Although today many criteria were defined with the studies started by Beall (3, 7), it is still not very easy to determine the predatory journals and publishers.
It has been reported in some studies that young and inexperienced authors of the developing countries publish in such journals (1, 2, 8, 9). For this reason, first of all our young authors should be aware of the existence of such predatory or fake journals. It must be known that these journals give serious harm to science and scientists. For this reason, the Ministry of Health, universities, societies of various branches of science and legitimate journals have important duties in order to raise awareness and provide the necessary education. An editorial written by 15 important ORL journal editors to draw attention to this issue was published in all of the journals in early 2018 (10). In our country, meetings, courses and other educational activities about this issue will be especially useful for young and inexperienced academicans.
Finally, our young authors should be very careful in the selection of the journals to which they will submit their manuscripts and should be skeptical on the invitations about joining the editorial boards of unknown journals. Special attention should be paid to these invitation emails, which increase in number day by day and one should be critical during submission process.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Gizem Kayan who is responsible for editorial development in AVES, for her contributions to the technical evaluations of journals and publishers.
References
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