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Have you heard of 'predatory' publishers or journals? Such publishers or journals charge authors for publishing articles without having been peer-reviewed. Their number is growing. A list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers and journals can be found at Scholarly Open Access

The open access movement has come out of the idea that publicly-funded research should be available to the public. There are thousands of open access journals but many of them are seen to lack the prestige that universities demand for researchers. Academics can’t afford to read their own work but they can’t afford not to publish in these prestigious journals if they want to advance their careers. Many academics have to seek other means for finding articles rather than pay the minimum US$30 that most publishers charge to access an article.

A 27-year-old graduate student from Kazakhstan is operating a searchable online database of nearly 50 million stolen scholarly journal articles, shattering the $10 billion-per-year paywall of academic publishers. She has kept herself beyond the reach of a federal judge who late last year issued an injunction against her site, noting that damages could total $150,000 per article

In October 2015, a New York district court ruled in favor of the academic publisher Elsevier, which had accused Sci-Hub, a website that offers pirated versions of academic papers, of copyright violation. That decision allowed authorities to take down the site’s domain name, sci-hub.org. Suspending a domain name does not delete a website forever, though, it just prevents visitors from knowing where exactly to find it. It’s trivial enough to relaunch the same site under another domain, as Sci-Hub did.

In an unprecedented crackdown on academic misconduct, as many as 179 university professors from some 110 universities in South Korea were indicted on Monday after an extensive criminal investigation into a huge copyright scam. The professors have been charged with republishing existing textbooks written by others under their own names by modifying the covers with the alleged connivance of the publishing companies.