Predatory publishing

Much has been written about ‘predatory publishing’ over the past decade. In this discussion document, COPE will describe the basic phenomenon, identify the key issues, describe the impact on the various stakeholders involved, analyse proposed interventions and solutions, and present COPE’s perspective on addressing the problem going forward. This discussion will synonymously refer to predatory publishing and predatory journals/publications as fake scholarly publishing and fake scholarly journals/publications, respectively, and will elaborate on the issues with terminology. While the focus of this discussion paper is primarily journals, there are also predatory conferences and predatory proceedings of those conferences. COPE welcomes feedback and comments from publishers, journal editors, reviewers, researchers, institutions, librarians, funders, and other stakeholders on this subject. This discussion document covers: the characteristics of predatory publications; deception using the name of an existing journal or a similar title to a well-established journal; how predatory publishers recruit authors; innocent victims of predatory publications and those willing to associate themselves with such journals; other stakeholders affected by predatory publishers; moral and legal responses; advice and further resources for funders, institutions, editors, peer reviewers, journals and publishers