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On (Conflating) Predatory Journals and Predatory Practices

2025· article· en· W4408361682 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Christophe Dony

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Journal of Information and Library Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicSpecies Distribution and Climate Change
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPredatory pricingEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This commentary critically presents and discusses some of the information-literacy and pedagogical principles underlying the development of Compass to Publish, a free online tool which helps users determine the possible predatory nature of open access journals requiring or hiding article processing charges (APCs). It then moves on to discuss the limits of the tool in terms of scalability possibilities based on user feedback. Finally, the commentary shares critical observations regarding the difficulties for future developments of the tool as they can relate to newer forms of predatory practices such as paper mill activity and other indicators of compromised research.

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 armCategoriesStudy designConfidence
gemmaMetaresearchResearch integrityScholarly communication
Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Empirical
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Theoretical or conceptuallow
gptMetaresearchResearch integrityScholarly communication
Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Commentary
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Theoretical or conceptualhigh
models agreeAgreement compares identical category sets and study designs across arms.

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.022
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.109
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Research integrity
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: Evaluation · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.983
Threshold uncertainty score0.121

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0220.109
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0040.006
Science and technology studies0.0110.045
Scholarly communication0.0170.014
Open science0.0040.006
Research integrity0.0170.014
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.014
GPT teacher head0.243
Teacher spread0.228 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Labeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
DomainEvaluation
GenreEmpirical · Commentary

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".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venueCanadian Journal of Information and Library ScienceSame topicSpecies Distribution and Climate ChangeCategoryMetaresearchFrench-language works237,207