What makes a journal predatory
A journal that will publish almost anything for a fee can look, from its invitation and its website, much like a legitimate open-access journal. What sets it apart is what it does for the fee and the business model that makes the practice pay.
Definitions of a predatory journal
Predatory journals have always been difficult to define and identify, and they must be told apart from scholarly society and professional journals.
A consensus definition published in December 2019 states that predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritise self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterised by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices. It was agreed by experts drawn from industry organisations, society and commercial publishers, research institutes, libraries, policymakers and other academic roles. The definition keeps the term predatory, although the Centre for Journalology in Ottawa had earlier proposed "misleading journals" instead.
Another account holds that predatory publishing is best defined as the exploitation of the open-access publishing system for the sole purpose of making a profit, while neglecting key aspects of scientific rigour and publication ethics. The fraudulent publishers it describes are widely known as predatory publishers because of their aggressive and damaging tactics. To maximise profit, they want to attract and publish as many manuscripts as possible. They publish articles without the usual standards and processes that genuine publishers adhere to.
A predatory publisher has also been defined as an opportunistic venue that exploits the academic need to publish but offers little reward. Its common characteristics include that its primary goal is making money, it does not care about the quality of what it publishes, it makes false claims or promises, it engages in unethical business practices, and it does not follow the accepted standards or best practices of scholarly publishing.
A predatory journal has also been defined as an exploitative open-access academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services typically associated with legitimate journals.
Predatory and legitimate open-access journals
The joint position statement on predatory publishing of the American Medical Writers Association, the European Medical Writers Association and the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals holds that predatory journals differ from legitimate open-access journals in that they subvert the peer-review publication system for the sole purpose of financial gain, with little evident concern for ethical behaviour. Organisations such as the World Association of Medical Editors, the Committee on Publication Ethics, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and the Council of Science Editors support good publication practices that are now widely recognised. Predatory journals do not adhere to these practices and instead exploit the gold open-access model, in which authors pay a publication fee. To generate revenue, they intentionally misrepresent their practices of editorial and peer review, their methods of operation, their article processing charges, and their dissemination, indexing and archiving.
Some reputable journals also charge a fee for open-access publishing, and one reviewer holds that calling predatory journals pay-to-play journals could, through a misunderstanding, discourage researchers from using the reputable ones.
What a predatory journal does for the fee
Predatory journals, also known as pseudo-scientific journals, exist purely for profit, and their sole purpose is to siphon off money from authors. To maximise profit, they disregard all aspects of scientific integrity. They use the open-access model to publish just about anything as long as the authors pay the fee. The deal is that the author pays and the journal publishes without looking at the article too closely, if at all; the author gets a publication to add to the curriculum vitae and the publisher gets the money. Once the fee is paid, predatory journals publish manuscripts regardless of their scientific merit, very often without any peer review and without providing editorial services.
A predatory journal requests an article processing charge from its authors but performs no real scientific peer review, so the quality of what it publishes is questionable. Predatory journals shortcut the peer-review process entirely or substitute a superficial pseudo-review for it. Predatory publishers and journals undermine the publishing process by failing to perform rigorous peer review, and they show little apparent regard for the ethical principles set out in guidelines such as the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' Recommendations. Some predatory publishers perform a pseudo peer review and then accept manuscripts regardless of the reviewers' recommendations. Predatory journals are dishonest about peer review, they hide the true costs, and they do not abide by rules and agreements.
Predatory activities, mainly journals and conferences but also books, author services and journal indexes, tend to focus on deceiving authors into thinking they are paying for a service that is not delivered. For example, an author pays a journal a fee to make an article open access on publication, and the fee is meant to cover costs such as peer review, copyediting, proofreading and search engine optimisation. In predatory publishing none of these services takes place, and articles are published without any form of independent check.
The business model
The business model is almost elegantly simple. In gold, or author-pays, open access, the most common form of open-access publishing, authors bear the publishing costs through article processing charges, whereas in the traditional model journal subscriptions largely defray them. Predatory publishers collect lucrative gold open-access article processing charges through fraud and misrepresentation. Using free email services, they sent scientists masses of flattering emails soliciting submissions. The emails often failed to mention the charge, which was sometimes much higher or much lower than a legitimate open-access journal's. Their journal websites, made with free design software, were amateurish but effective. A submission was accepted, often with few or no peer-review comments, and an invoice followed. An author who refused to pay could find the submission effectively held hostage, with the journal unresponsive to requests to withdraw it. The ethical prohibition on duplicate submission also meant that the unpublished work could not be submitted elsewhere. An author who paid usually found the article posted exactly as submitted, with no evidence of peer review, editing or graphic design. With little overhead beyond cheap hosting for the submitted files, a stable of journals could be created quickly, even by a publisher consisting of one person.
Predatory publishers large enough to become profitable branched out into meetings, congresses and symposia, which were of low quality like their journals. A common trick was to book large ballrooms at a hotel in a popular tourist city and subdivide them, so that several meetings ran at the same hotel on the same weekend with a shoestring staff. The profit came from registration fees significantly higher than those of legitimate societies' meetings and from abstracts solicited by the same spam. Speakers and attendees were required to use the organiser's preferred travel vendor, which was another division of the same company. Other predatory publishers moved into services around scholarly publishing, such as metrics. Unlike those of established metrics providers, these metrics are either fictitious or, where actually calculated, essentially worthless, because most institutions do not accept them as valid measures of a journal's impact and performance. Predatory publishers have created an ecosystem of low-quality, low-impact, low-value products and services. Other predatory operations include fraudulent meetings, counterfeit impact factors and hijacked journals, which are counterfeit websites that steal a real journal's identity.