Re: Jena R, Sharma AP, Madhavan K, Sridhar AN, Parmar K, Shrivastava N. What should urologists know about pseudojournals and open access publishing? A narrative review of the literature. Indian J Urol 2022;38:184-90

We read the article by Jena et al. published in this journal[1] and congratulate the authors for conducting this much-needed study to make urologists aware about pseudojournals and open access publishing. However, based on the methodology and results, we would like to make certain observations.

The authors rightly suggest that publishing articles for money is the main motive of predatory journals. Predatory journals curtail the steps of manuscript evaluation, peer review, editing, and quality assurance and thus keep lower publishing costs to lure the authors and use the author's fees as profit.[2] However, a few journals included in the 'white lists' also require an exorbitant article processing fee. Listing of a journal in a reputed search engine such as PUBMED, Scopus, Embase, or Web of Science has been suggested as one of the criteria to consider a journal as non-predatory. Nevertheless, many so called predatory journals may have entered PUBMED database since PubMed and PubMed Central use less strict criteria for a journal's inclusion into their databases than MEDLINE. Some journals <2-year-old with <25 articles are included because of reputable researchers on their editorial board.[3] Authors need to be mindful of infiltration of PubMed by these journals while submitting an article and not consider its indexing as a reliable tool to classify a journal as nonpredatory.

Out of the 68 journals from which emails were received, 9 were considered to be genuine open access journals with a genuine peer-review process. However, none of these journals were in urology green lists or UGC-CARE list. It would have been better if it was clarified whether these nine journals were classified as a genuine journal based on the proposed SAFEiMAP checklist or any other checklist. Furthermore, it would have been better to further refine SAFEiMAP checklist and make it an objective scoring system to help the academicians in classifying any journal into pseudojournal, gray zone, or genuine.

The review included 33 articles out of which 14 were searched through the databases and rest through online search on the concepts and principles of PubMed and the Committee on Publication Ethics. Was equal weightage given to both these types of articles? The statistical methods followed to arrive at the red flag signs and to create the checklist could have been mentioned. Furthermore, a PRISMA 2020 flow diagram for new systematic reviews which included searches of databases, registers and other sources would have made it easier to understand the methodology.

A recent metaanalysis has reported 93 checklists being used to check for predatory journals, with the contents of most of these checklists being similar, and most of them being reliable. Hence, the advantages of SAFEiMAP checklist over others could have been elaborated in detail.

We agree that the menace of predatory journals has plagued scientific publishing, but sometimes, good-quality articles are published by authors in these journals due to ignorance. Authors with legitimate articles in these journals should have a mechanism for retraction of the articles and submission to a whitelisted journal followed by a rigorous review. This concept should be explored further by the publishers of genuine journals.

Furthermore, while it seems sensible that academic institutes should mention that publications in predatory journals will not be considered contributory toward faculty appointments or promotions, we must first analyze whether there are enough genuine journals to accommodate the mandatory articles authored by all the teaching faculty and rectify the situation else this problem of predatory publishing will keep on growing in spite of all efforts.