PREDATORY JOURNALS: A GLOBAL THREAT TO THE SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING LANDSCAPE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There has been a major trend in academic publishing from traditional print publication to open access journals and online publication in recent times. The authors now find more avenues to publish their work than before, but at the same time vulnerable to become prey to predatory journals. The term ”Predatory Journals” was first coined by Jeffrey Beall 1 , Associate Professor and librarian at the university of Colorado Denver. According to Beall predatory publisher is one“which publish counterfeit journals to exploit the open access model in which the author pays.” The most recent clear, comprehensive and consensus definition of predatory journal was formulated in April 2019 in Ottawa, Canada by 43 researchers belonging to 10 different countries. 2 Their definition reads“ Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized 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.”Alternative terms for predatory journals are “Dark Journals,” 2 “Illegitimate Journals” 3,4 “Deceptive Journals” 5 Pseudo Journals” 6 and “Journals Operating in Bad Faith” 7
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
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | MetaresearchScholarly communication Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
| gpt | Scholarly communicationResearch integrity Domain: not available · Genre: Commentary About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Not applicable | medium |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.004 |
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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
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".