Do Tenure and Promotion Policies Discourage Publications in Predatory Journals?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Predatory journals are a concern in academia because they lack meaningful peer review and engage in questionable business practices. Nevertheless, predatory journals continue to flourish, in part because of increasing expectations that academic researchers demonstrate publishing productivity in quantifiable forms. We examined tenure and promotion policies at twenty Canadian universities and did not find any language that explicitly discourages publications in predatory journals. Instead, subjective criteria such as ‘quality’ are commonly used to assess the appropriateness of publication outlets. Additionally, information on avoiding predatory journals was located only on the library’s website at nearly every institution, and the information was primarily directed at students rather than at faculty members. We argue that if predatory journals are truly a threat to the integrity of academic research and knowledge dissemination, universities must take more substantive action against them. We recommend four institutional initiatives to discourage faculty members from publishing in predatory journals.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.047 | 0.291 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.043 | 0.095 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.201 | 0.134 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".