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The citation for the next article is: Beall, J. (2013) Predatory publishing is just one of the consequences of gold open access, Learned Publishing, 26(2): pp 79-84. DOI: 1087/20130203

Predatory publishing is just one of the consequences of gold open access 79

LEARNED PUBLISHING VOL. 26 NO. 2 APRIL 2013

Predatory publishing is just one of the consequences of gold open accessJeffrey Beall

Learned Publishing, 26: 79–84doi:10.1087/20130203

POINT OF VIEW

Predatory publishing is justone of the consequences ofgold open accessJeffrey BEALLUniversity of Colorado Denver

This article examines the ways the gold open-access model is negatively affecting scholarly communication.

Introduction

I have been closely following and par-ticipating in the open-access (OA) movement since 2008. In that year, when the gold OA model fi rst began to be implemented on a large scale, I noticed the appearance of several new publishers that lacked trans-parency and used deceptive websites to attract manuscript sub missions and the accompanying author fees. Initially, I printed out copies of their web pages and placed them in a blue folder. In 2009, I published a review of the publisher Bentham Open in the library review journal the Charleston Advisor. Writing a second review in the same journal in 2010, I coined the term ‘predatory publisher’ and changed the focus of my informal blog, called Metadata, to predatory publishing. I published my fi rst list of predatory publishers on my old blog in 2010, but it drew almost no atten-tion. In late 2011, gathering together the expanding materials in my blue folder, I published a second list of predatory publishers that garnered much attention. Later in early 2012 I moved my blog to an improved platform and changed its name to Scholarly Open Access. Throughout 2012, I continued tracking, listing, and writing about the new publishers that I added to my list. The 2010 list included 18 publishers, the 2011 list had 23, and the 2013 list had over 225. Also beginning in early 2012, I started keeping a second list of inde-pendent journals that do not publish under the aegis of any publisher, and that list now contains over 150 titles.

In this paper, I relate the new and important things that I have learned about scholarly publishing, OA, and

the communication of science. I argue that the gold OA model is a failure, that the debate surround-ing OA has become contentious and divisive, and that the future of scholarly publishing is in peril. Never before has the scholarly publishing industry attracted so much attention from scholars, researchers, and aca-demics. The medium of scholarship has now become the intense focus of scholarship itself, and many have a stake in its outcome.

A brief history of open access

The story of OA publishing begins with the advent of the Internet and soon after with librarians alert-ing the academic community to the ever-increasing subscription prices of scholarly journals. At that time, the term ‘serials crisis’ was coined. Libraries began to cancel journal sub-scriptions, yet at the same time the desktop publishing revolution helped increase the number of journals being published by medium- and small-sized organizations. Also, the amount of scholarship being published

increased dramatically worldwide, creating the need and the markets for new journals and publishers to make it all available.

Reacting to the criticism and to the journal cancellations, the schol-arly publishing industry took action. They granted libraries new econo-mies of scale, one in the form of journal bundling, which increased the number of titles that individual academic libraries were able to afford and make available to their users. The second economy of scale was to grant deep discounts to library con-sortia. Repurposing existing library cooperative ventures involving tradi-tional library functions such as cata-loging, libraries organized regional and statewide consortia – groups of libraries that function basically as buyers’ cooperatives. Publishers competed with each other for librar-ies’ business, granting deep discounts that essentially resolved the serials crisis by 2004.

One other aspect of the serials crisis was the impact of the higher journal subscription prices on librar-ies in developing countries, but pub-

80 Jeffrey Beall


lishers also solved this problem. The Research4Life program grants free or very low cost access to subscrip-tion e-journals in developing coun-tries. Many fail to acknowledge the contributions of the Research4Life program in the developing world. In some developing countries, this pro-gram brings about a greater access to contemporary journal literature than libraries in developed countries can provide. Many are ignorant of these programs and fatuously malign estab-lished publishers for their supposed indifference.

But despite the resolution of the serials crisis, the seeds of revolution had already been planted. The truth of the crisis’ resolution was incom-modious to those fervently advocat-ing OA. Moreover, the strong leftist and anti-corporatist propensity of the academy led to an identifi cation of its arch-enemy: the large, for-profi t scholarly publishers. The OA advocates even named their poster child of corporate malevolence, pub-lisher Reed Elsevier, long respected as a high-quality scholarly publisher whose portfolio includes many of world’s top academic journals. The zealots have symbolically burned Elsevier in effi gy for so many years now that the protests have become hackneyed.

Meanwhile, faculty salaries in c-reased dramatically during this same period. Many of the same faculty members across North America who were protesting higher journal sub-scription costs concurrently saw giant increases in their salaries. Increasing retirements meant more inter- university competition for faculty across the United States, a competi-tion that many faculty were happy to exploit.

Later many would realize that one of the chief benefi ciaries of the anti-corporatist OA movement would be corporations themselves. Countless companies and private organiza-tions with research and development

departments contributed to lowering the overall cost of academic publish-ing by subscribing to scholarly publi-cations. Now these corporations are benefi ting from OA by not paying the subscription costs they used to pay, costs that essentially subsidized the subscription costs paid by librar-ies to support scholarly publishing. OA decreases the pool of money that publishers (traditional or author-pays) can dedicate to meeting the costs of high-quality publishing.

Flipping the model from print to online

In the early 2000s, scholarly pub-lishers began to fl ip their publishing models from print to online. Many, if not most, now publish exclusively online. This change involved a mas-sive investment on the part of pub-lishers. One of the amazing benefi ts of this change was the digitization of journal backfi les. Like never before, scholars could search entire runs of journals including, in many cases, issues from as far back as the 19th century. Publishers also created and implemented new value-added fea-tures to facilitate research such as automatic reference linking. They invested in digital preservation, safe-guarding their products against loss and format change. Traditional toll-access publishers focused most of their innovations on the consumers of their products, the readers.

The rise and fall of gold OA

At the same time, the gold OA model began to proliferate and, along with this, the focus changed. For many journals, authors became publishers’ customers, leaving readers as second-ary players in the new OA equation. The fatal fl aw of the gold OA model is the built-in confl ict of interest: the more papers a journal accepts, the more money it makes. There is no way around this confl ict, and it is this

that has created the whole problem of predatory publishers.

The weaknesses of the gold OA model are many. Some are now even sarcastically calling it ‘pay to say’. The model will limit contributions to those with access to funds to support article processing charges (APCs). While it is true that some publishers offer waivers or discounts on the fees levied on authors, these are in reality the exception, I think.

Gold OA threatens the existence of scholarly societies, chiefl y those in the arts and humanities. Largely funded by library subscriptions to their journals, scholarly societies are facing a no-win situation with gold OA. In many fi elds, authors have never paid APCs and are uncomfort-able with the idea of paying them. Moreover, even with author charges, many societies would still not make enough money to support their pub-lishing programs and would lose the subsidies that these programs now provide to societies’ overall operat-ing costs. Here, the traditional pub-lishing system operated as a kind of commonwealth. Many academic libraries and other organisations paid reasonable subscription costs to soci-ety publishers, and these contribu-tions spread out the costs and sup-ported the important work of the learned societies. Gold OA threatens to destroy this successful system and leaves arts and humanities societies with few positive choices as to how to operate their publishing programs.

A second very negative impact of the advent of gold OA publish-ing is the alarming increase in author misconduct. Ironically, OA makes author misconduct easier to fi nd and document. Misconduct that involves piracy, such as plagiarism, can eas-ily be confi rmed by searching for a plagiarized passage on the Internet. But there are many additional forms of author misconduct that seem to be appearing more frequently; these include self-plagiarism, image or data



manipulation, ghost authorship, hon-orary authorship, duplicate submis-sion, and salami slicing, which refers to splitting up a coherent article and submitting it as more than a single work.

A 1983 article by Thomas F. Gieryn entitled ‘Boundary work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and interests in pro-fessional ideologies of scientists’ and published in the American Sociological Review bears relevance today in the context of predatory publishers.1 It’s diffi cult to describe the peer-review practices of many questionable pub-lishers because they hide it, lie about it, or don’t do it, even though they say they do.

Gieryn describes boundary work as ‘an ideological style found in sci-entists’ attempts to create a public image for science by contrasting it favorably to non-scientifi c intellec-tual or technical activities’.1 It is important for scientists to mark clearly the border between sci-ence and non-science; this is called demarcation. Peer review is the mechanism through which scientists defi ne and enforce this boundary. Because so many predatory publish-ers and journals are negligent in their management of peer review (or do not carry it out at all despite claiming to), we can conclude that the bound-ary between science and non-science is increasingly becoming vague, vio-lated, and unpatrolled.

Author Nicoli Nattrass has built on Gieryn’s work, applying it to the case of AIDS denialism. A small and disruptive social movement from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s spread the falsehood that HIV is harmless and that anti-retroviral drugs were the disease’s true cause. In her 2012 book The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back,2 Nattrass details how sci-entists defended the evidence they had found that linked HIV to AIDS and how they negated the opposing, bogus theories. Chapter 7 in her book

is entitled ‘Defending the Imprimatur of Science: Duesberg and the Medical Hypotheses Saga’. Probably one of the most eloquent defenses of peer review ever, the chapter details how the peer-review process of the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses had become corrupted, allowing AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg to get an unscientifi c paper published in the journal – a paper that scientists successfully rose to expose as unsci-entifi c. There are many similar cases of bogus science among contempo-rary journals, especially the predatory ones, but few are rising to defend sci-ence’s boundaries. Is it too late?

Pesudoscience is the same thing as non-science, and it is growing rapidly. Wikipedia has an informa-tive article on the topic and gives examples including rebirthing ther-apy, cold fusion, reiki, and ayurvedic medicine. Indeed, there is a category in Wikipedia that collocates articles on different types of pseudoscience. These include articles covering well-known bogus sciences such as astrology and alternative medicine, and they also include corruptions of traditional fi elds, such as pseudohis-tory, pseudophysics, and pseudoar-chaeology. The role of peer review is to protect science from these false disciplines, to grant a seal of approval to work that meets the standards of science. Because research is cumula-tive, boundary work and honest peer review are essential to protect sci-ence from the infl uence of the false sciences.

The economic downturn that started in 2008 has ultimately resulted in an intense pressure on scholars to publish. State-supported institutions now demand increased accountabil-ity from the researchers they sup-port. They want to demonstrate a return on investment. This need to document accountability feeds right into the mouths of the predatory OA scholarly publishers. The need has fueled the predatory publish-

ing market, which is snowballing in size as lazy authors repurpose their or others’ earlier works into quick, new journal articles. It is normally a positive development when markets emerge that fi ll consumers’ needs. But in this case many of the consum-ers (authors) have malevolent inten-tions. Many are not responding ethi-cally to their institutions’ demands for more accountability. Publishers want more papers because it means more income for them. These are the main factors that have increased author misconduct. The gold OA model is an unsustainable failure.

One result of this situation has been the publication of millions of useless articles that create an awful lot of academic noise. The excessive number of scholarly articles being published makes searching more dif-fi cult (one has more junk to weed out), and it makes keeping up with one’s fi eld more diffi cult. On the other hand, it may spark the devel-opment of recommender systems, such as F1000, that do this work for scholars, adding value to published works by sorting out the unworthy ones.

Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers

Earlier, I gave a brief history of the blog that includes the two lists I maintain. I now maintain the two lists (one of publishers, one of inde-pendent journals) on a WordPress blog platform. The website address is http://scholarlyoa.com. I also do reg-ular blogging on the website, usually adding about two blog posts per week. My goals in maintaining the lists are to help people by letting them know about the counterfeit publishers and to critically analyze various aspects of scholarly OA publishing.

I have also published on my blog a list of the criteria to be used when judging questionable journals.3

Some have suggested that keeping a list of quality publishers might be a



better approach than keeping a list of the bad ones. There are already metrics in place to measure quality journals, including the impact fac-tor. A weakness of the impact fac-tor is that it takes a long time (often several years or more) for an impact factor to be calculated. Other ‘posi-tive’ measures would also probably take time to calculate as well. On the other hand, negative components of publishers and journals, such as lack-ing an editorial board, spamming, and plagiarism, can be observed and recorded right away and often do not need to be measured over time. Hence a black list is easier to compile and maintain than a white list and by its nature contains more updated information than a white list could.

I often hear criticisms of my lists. Some believe that the predatory publishing problem is really a small problem, and my highlighting the problem is making it appear bigger than it really is. Others claim that we really need to give these preda-tory publishers a larger opportunity to succeed, that it is not fair to attack people from poor countries. I agree with this except when publishers use outright deception or signifi cant lack of transparency in their operations. Many have advised me that some startup publishers will eventually be successful and become respected in the scholarly community, even if they make honest mistakes early on. I agree and make every effort to exclude from my list operations that appear to be well-intentioned and honest startups.

In late 2012, a small group of predatory publishers colluded in a campaign to discredit me and my work. Using email spoofi ng, they sent out emails to publishers that appeared to be from me. The emails offered a re-evaluation of their inclu-sion on my lists in exchange for $5,000. They sent the spoofed email to publishers on my list, and they also created a bunch of fake blog

sites that contained the copy of the email. Some of the publishers on my lists are true criminals, so it is natural that they respond in a criminal man-ner to my reviews of their publishing operations.

The ongoing debate about OA

There are many who are content with the traditional system of schol-arly publishing, many who have no problem with signing over their copy-right to someone who can manage it for them better than they can, and many who really do not want their work to be accessible by the ever-increasing number of lonely pseudo-scientists on the Internet. Yes, it is wonderful that struggling scientists in the Global South now have increased access to scholarship, but how will they share what they learn when they have to pay to publish their research fi ndings?

I think the debate about licens-ing for OA works will continue. The standard for OA is the Creative Commons attribution 3.0 license, a broad waiving of rights that allows commercial and derivative works to be made of one’s scholarship. Many emerging companies, especially European ones, are developing new ways of aggregating and reselling this free content, and they are among the most strident in defending and promoting the broad CC BY license. Many in North America are wary of signing away so many rights, espe-cially commercial rights. They see OA chiefl y as ‘ocular,’ which means that access is limited to viewing OA works on the Internet, but not much more. Everyone is trying to predict the future of scholarship and OA. We are all anxious for the OA future to arrive so we will know how to manage and license it.

The online conversation sur-rounding OA is contentious. In social media, email lists, blogs, and websites, the OA movement mani-

fests itself daily, broadcasting piquant debates, personal attacks, and a diversity of opinion on how schol-arly publishing will and should pro-ceed. There is a lot at stake, and each stakeholder wants the future of scholarly communication to suit his or her best interests. Representatives of the traditional, toll-access publish-ers mostly avoid the debate, choos-ing instead to monitor the sharp linguistic volleys thrown around the Internet. Representatives of mega-journals, such as PLoS one, tout their products effectively using the Internet, perhaps leading many to believe the journal is more successful than it really is. Predatory publish-ers (and some other publishers) use spam email to solicit articles (and their accompanying fees) and edi-torial board memberships. Perhaps the strongest debate occurs between those preferring either the green route or the gold route to OA. I don’t see the green OA model as a solution to the problems of gold. It relies on mandates that are not being enacted or followed, and I do not believe that imposing OA mandates on research-ers is proper because it takes away their freedom to publish research in the way they see fi t.

We have seen several boycotts targeting Reed Elsevier, and for the organizers of these boycotts, they are an effective method for getting praise from colleagues and for being seen as heroic, but the boycotts have all failed. The boycotts’ popularity is ephemeral, and the enthusiasm for them soon wanes. This happens mostly because OA is really two things: a model of scholarly publish-ing, and a social movement. As a social movement, however, it is con-tentious and internecine. Scholarly publishing will continue to wander down an uncertain and unstable path, and only the fullness of time will bring about stability to the industry.

84 Jeffrey Beall


Libraries and librarians in the OA movement

Even though librarians are credited with having alerted academia to the serials crisis, they have been far from stellar in collaborating to resolve it. Many have anti-corporatist lean-ings, bemoaning any company’s attempt at making a fair profi t from scholarly publishing. Their collectiv-ist and anti-capitalist attitudes have strained relations among the produc-ers and consumers of scholarly con-tent. Many librarians in the United States and Canada are unionized, demanding high salaries, benefi ts, and favorable perks for themselves while simultaneously wailing over the ‘greed’ of the scholarly publishers.

Moreover, constrained by political correctness, many academic librar-ians in the West fear pointing out the corrupt practices of the preda-tory publishers based in developing countries, for fear of being pegged a racist. Many thought that defeat-ing the corporate publishers was the fi nal solution to the serials crisis, but the transition to gold OA has only created a new crisis, in the form of predatory publishers and prohibi-tively high author fees for scientifi c authors. Some react to predatory publishers by minimizing the prob-lems they create, either claiming that the predatory publishers are few, or that no serious scholar would submit to them anyway.

Librarians are also cataloging the journals published by predatory publishers and including them in their online catalogs, a practice that essentially grants a library’s seal of approval to the journal. Including predatory journals in library online catalogs is negligent, because it essentially promotes the journal to the library’s patrons. As librarians’ roles change from custodians of print collections to facilitators of online scholarship, they need to take quality

into account. Just because a resource is OA doesn’t mean that it is a quality resource. Librarians must be the fi rst to develop skills in what we might call scholarly publishing literacy, and then they must share these skills with their patrons. Thus, librarians need to add value to online information by helping validate it, and they must not blindly promote OA works just because they fulfi ll a certain collec-tivist ideology. Librarians have a ten-dency to be neophiliacs; they adopt a new technology or a new system merely because it is new. Librarians must be more discerning and must exclude political ideology from their library management operations. Many librarians are enthusiastic about the still unproven Alt-Metrics just because it is new. Librarians’ analyses of novel solutions tend to be gushing rather than critical.

Instead of zealously promoting a particular method of scholarly com-munication, librarians should ask themselves: what is the best model for the future of scholarly com-munication? The gold OA model is demonstrating many signifi cant weaknesses and drawbacks, so librar-ians and others need to re-examine the model with a healthy skepticism instead of doubling down and pro-moting it as the fi nal solution.

Moving forward

Predatory publishers are poisoning gold OA, and they threaten to harm all of scholarly communication. The gold OA model is failing, and the valuable validation feature that the traditional publishing model pro-vided is being lost. This corruption of scholarly publishing is making the future of all scholarly communication doubtful as to its quality and whether or not it really effectively communi-cates valid science.

The OA movement needs to

decide on licensing. This is an espe-cially contentious area. Many new businesses will accomplish great things given the wide availability of scientifi c research. They will be able to text-mine and repurpose the sci-entifi c corpus, creating new jobs and new scientifi c fi ndings.

There is a new type of scientifi c literacy, and it is called scientifi c publishing literacy. It means that sci-entists must be able judge publishers and conferences and make decisions about which are ethical and which are not. It will be an essential skill for all scientists to acquire if they want to be effective as researchers.

I hope to continue to list and research predatory publishers and predatory independent journals. Their number is expanding greatly. I think that many in developing countries have discovered scholarly publishing as an easy way to make money, and it has the benefi t of low startup costs. There are millions of researchers around the world des-perate to publish, and the predatory publishers are eager to have them as customers.

References

1. Gieryn, T.F. 1983. Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and interests in professional ide-ologies of scientists. American Sociological Review, 48: 781–795.

2. Nattrass, N. The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back. New York, Columbia University Press, 2012.

3. Beall, J. Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers, 2nd edn. Available at: http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/11/30/crite-ria-for-determining-predatory-open-access-publishers-2nd-edition/

Jeffrey BEALLUniversity of Colorado DenverAuraria Library1100 Lawrence StreetDenver, CO, USAEmail: [email protected]

© Jeffrey Beall 2013

The citation for the next article is: Bowman, J.D. (2014) Predatory publishing, questionable peer review, and fraudulent conferences, American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 78(10): Article 176. DOI: 5688/ajpe7810176

SPECIAL ARTICLE

Predatory Publishing, Questionable Peer Review, and FraudulentConferences

John D. Bowman, MS

Irma Lerma Rangel College of Pharmacy, Texas A&M Health Sciences Center, Kingsville, Texas

Submitted February 25, 2014; accepted April 21, 2014; published December 15, 2014.

Open-access is a model for publishing scholarly, peer-reviewed journals on the Internet that relies onsources of funding other than subscription fees. Some publishers and editors have exploited theauthor-pays model of open-access, publishing for their own profit. Submissions are encouragedthrough widely distributed e-mails on behalf of a growing number of journals that may accept manyor all submissions and subject them to little, if any, peer review or editorial oversight. Bogus con-ference invitations are distributed in a similar fashion. The results of these less than ethical practicesmight include loss of faculty member time and money, inappropriate article inclusions in curriculumvitae, and costs to the college or funding source.

Keywords: peer review, open access, scientific publishing, scientific conferences

INTRODUCTIONThe advent of the Internet age and digitization of data

resulted in many changes, one of which was the concept ofpeer-reviewed, open-access (OA) publishing with freeavailability to anyonewith Internet services. This transitionincreased when the National Institutes of Health (NIH)began requiring that any manuscript resulting from itsfunding bemade publicly available via PubMed. The num-ber of high-quality scientific research manuscripts pub-lished via OA continues to increase. Unfortunately, therehas also been an increase in attempts to exploit the OAconcept for profit by requiring authors to pay for publica-tion up front and performing none of the peer review ad-vertised. These groups market their “services” throughe-mails to scientists and faculty members, offering recipi-ents theopportunity to publish articles in a newonlinepeer-reviewed journal, to serve as a reviewer or editor of a newjournal, or to speak or host a roundtable discussion at a con-ference, which may be described as “global” or “interna-tional.” The objective of this article is to describe some ofthese practices and ways to avoid them.

DEVELOPMENT OF OPEN ACCESSPUBLISHING

The publishing paradigm has changed from print-only subscriptions to digitally available and free scientific

publications. Nature was first published in 1869, Sciencein 1880, and subsequently scientific journal publishinghas increased to the point of a new paper being publishedevery 20 seconds.1 In 2000, the future of scientific pub-lishing was changed by the debut of PubMed Central andthe Public Library of Science (PLoS). The next year,thousands of scientists called for a boycott of journals thatwould not allow free access on PubMed within 6 months.In 2002, for-profit Biomed Central began chargingauthors $500 to publish. In 2003, PLoS Biology waslaunched, charging authors $1500. By 2006, PLoS initi-ated the non-profitPLoSOne, charged a $2500 author fee,and reviewed articles by placing scientific rigor over im-portance. In 2008, NIHmandated that papers published asa result of its funding be made free to the public within12 months, and in 2009, the US Congress permanentlyrequired that all funded investigators submit electronicversions of their manuscripts to the National Library ofMedicine’s PubMed Central.2 By 2010, PLoS generatedrevenues greater than costs and PLoS One became theworld’s largest scientific publisher by volume.

Open-access literature is electronic, online, free ofcharge to any reader, and free of most copyright andlicensing restrictions.3 Internet users may freely read,download, copy, distribute, and print literature with-out restriction. Copyright holders consent to open accessusing Creative Commons4 or other open-content li-censes. Publication fees may be charged to the author,particularly for high-impact publications, to defray thecosts of online publication. Most frequently, however,the author is sponsored by his employer or throughfunding.

Corresponding author: John D. Bowman, MS, Irma LermaRangel College of Pharmacy, Texas A&M Health SciencesCenter, 1010 West Avenue B, MSC 131, Kingsville, TX78363-8202. Tel: 361-221-0704. Fax: 361-221-0794. E-mail:[email protected]

American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 2014; 78 (10) Article 176.

1

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) wasfounded in 2003 and, as of this writing, included 9708journals and 1 595 160 articles.5 The stated aim of theDOAJ is to increase the visibility and ease of use of OAscientific and scholarly journals, thereby promoting theirincreased usage and impact.

Laakso et al conducted a systematic study of OApublications from 1993 to 2009, which described thegrowth of the peer-reviewed publishing format and char-acterized 3 periods: pioneering (1993-1999), innovation(2000-2004), and consolidation (2005-2009).6 The au-thors estimated that during 2010, 191 000 OA articleswere published in 4769 journals. The costs of online pub-lishing are different from those of printing and shippinghard-copy journals, requiring new approaches to subsi-dize the remaining costs of copy editing, web hosting,and effective peer review.

For some journals, adaptation to the changes in sci-entific publication has been problematic.7 A number ofprofessional organization journals contracted with com-mercial publishing companies resulting in some cases insubstantially increased journal costs with which librarybudgets could not keep pace.8 Members of such smallerorganizations had to choose to pay the increased dues or tonot renew. However, the development of OA eased manyof these problems, and an infrastructure was developedfor organizations to economically outsource manuscriptreview, handling, and publication.

In other cases, highly respected peer-reviewed jour-nals such as Science and the Journal of Biologic Chemis-try present their full text online only to subscribers.Otherspost only the table of contents and abstracts for each issue.EllisRubinstein, editor ofScience, said: “We’re still in theearliest stages of having an impact on our readers. If youlook at this situation even five years from now, you willsee a major impact. . .” on scientific journals’ use of theInternet to provide information to readers.9

PEER REVIEWVan Noorden argued that the scientific community

carried out peer review for free, yet the publishing com-panies charged billions of dollars a year for the samepersons to read the articles.10 The average cost to thepublisher for an article is thought to be around $3500-$4000. Open-access fees are much lower than this, withBioMed Central, and PLoS charging $1350-$2250 formany of their journals, although some are as high as$2900. PeerJ offers to publish an unlimited number ofpapers per author for a one-time of $299.

Sabharwal et al noted in a review of 63 orthopedicjournals identified via the ISI Web of Knowledge that 38(60.3%) did not offer any formofOApublishing, and only

5 (8%) published all their content as OA.11 Twenty(31.7%) journals offered authors the choice to publishtheir article as OA if a publication fee (median $3000)was paid. The median impact factor was 1.28 for sub-scription journals and 1.47 for OA publications.

Open-access titles such as the PLoS Medicine andPLoS Biology have impact factors of 15.3 and 12.7 re-spectively. Some aspiring authors accepted the model ofauthor-pays or author sponsor-pays forOApeer-reviewedpublishing. The NIH mandate for taxpayer-funded re-search to be published in PubMed decreased the gripfor-profit publishers had on new knowledge. Librariesbenefited from reduced costs for former subscription-only journals and less frequent permission requests forcopyright waivers.

Maintaining quality control in peer review dependson rigorous review by both editorial staff and readers.12

Those who volunteer to peer review manuscripts per-form an essential service for which no formal trainingis available. The quality of peer review may vary amongreviewers. A fictitious manuscript concerning a double-blind, placebo-controlled study of intravenous propran-olol for acute migraine headache pain was crafted toinclude errors in order to evaluate peer reviewer perfor-mance.13 Of 199 reviewers who made recommenda-tions, 15 recommended acceptance, 117 rejection, and67 revision. Sixty-eight percent of the reviewers failed torecognize that the conclusions of the study were notsupported by the results.

The process of peer reviewing scientific manu-scripts, unlike the studies that are reviewed, has not beenexamined in a systematic way in order to define essentialpeer review mechanisms that can support policy mea-sures.14 In a study of almost 1500 National Heart, Lung,and Blood Institute-funded cardiovascular R01 grants,Danthi et al analyzed percentile rankings and citationanalysis outcomes for publications resulting from theawards.15 Projects with the lowest priority scores fromreviewers received just asmany citations and publicationsas those with the best scores. Although potential impact isone of the main criteria for review of proposals, peer re-view did not succeed in predicting this outcome. The un-fortunate conclusion was that the proposals given thelowest priority got the least or no funding even thoughtheir impact as measured by citations, and time to publishwas no different from those given high priority andawarded larger grants.

Publication brings clinicians and scientists’ ideasto the public and establishes intellectual property rightsfor the ideas and data presented in the articles. Moreover,a peer-reviewed publication demonstrates that criticalscrutiny was applied. Fisher and Powell provide a


2

commentary on publishingwith useful guidelines for bothreviewers and authors.16

Bordage performed a content analysis of reviewercommentson151medical education researchmanuscripts.17

An average of 4 peers reviewed each manuscript, andreasons they gave for rejecting a paper were assessed,which included inappropriate statistics or instrumentation,small or biased sample, difficult or unclear text, insufficientproblem statement, incomplete review of literature, insuf-ficient data presented, and defects in tables or figures.

A useful blog about peer review can be found ata Nature website.18 At Nature Chemical Biology, for ex-ample, reviewers are given advice based on the idea thatthey are making important commitments to the authorsand the journal. Any potential conflicts or concerns aboutexpertise should be disclosed before agreeing to accepta review request. Reviewers should treat manuscripts asconfidential and not distribute or disclose its contentsahead of publication. Reviewers are given a deadline of2 weeks for the initial review, and should be available toreview revised versions of the manuscript, which often in-clude new data. The most useful comments a reviewer canprovide will outline arguments for or against publication,and provide authors with specific suggestions as well asa detailed assessment of its technical merit, how the paperfits in with current published research, and the study’spotential significance and appeal. A number of other post-ings on this blog site offer additional advice for reviewers.

PREDATORY PUBLISHING PRACTICESWhile the concept of predatory publishing is not new,

itmaynot bewidelyknown in scholarly pharmacypracticeand research. Predatory publishing is the practice of pub-lishing journals that exploit the emerging acceptance ofopen-access academic journals to undermine peer-reviewprocesses.19 Most often, the author pays a publication feeto the publisher, whowill purportedly send themanuscriptto an editorial staff for peer review. Yet, articles maybe accepted without any change. In Science, Bohannonrevealed that a completely contrived research paper wasaccepted for publication by more than half of the peer-reviewed journals to which it was submitted.20 JeffreyBeall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver,called the unscrupulous publishers “predatory,” althoughthere may be various degrees of quality subsumed underthis pejorative term.19 He lists such publishers and stand-alone journals on his blog Scholarly Open Access.21 Beallcommented, “The author-pays model is changing schol-arly publishing because authors, rather than libraries orother subscribers, become the publishers’ customers, anarrangement that creates a built-in conflict of interest. Themore articles a publisher accepts, the more revenue it

earns. New Open Access publishers are appearing almostweekly, and many are engaged in unethical practices.”22

To be fair, many highly respected and completely ethicalpublishers charge author fees. Beall described in detailhis review and analysis of open-access publishers andassigned comparative ratings to several characteris-tics.21-23 Beall’s concerns are not about open-access perse, but about exploitation of the peer-review process andpublishing practices.

Not everyone agrees with Beall. In a recent studyusing the impact factor or number of citations as a proxyfor the scientific quality of thousands of subscription andopen-access publications from Web of Science and Sco-pus, Bjork and Solomon concluded that in health andscience, open-access journals receive about as many ci-tations as subscription journals.23 The impact factor re-ceives tacit acceptance as an indicator of scholarly qualityfor many who plan to publish, search committees whoevaluate CVs, and rank and tenure committees who ex-amine faculty member credentials.

The modus operandi of predatory publishing gener-ally takes the form of a publisher distributing e-mailsasking recipients to submit articles, or to serve on theeditorial board or even as editor of a new publication witha scientific-sounding title. Authors are asked to pay pub-lication costs either before or after submission and arelikely nonrefundable. The costs may be relatively low toentice unsuspecting scholars. Karen Coyle, also a librar-ian, likened such “cold call” requests to the 1849 US goldrush. She noted “While many hopefuls flock to the goldrush, so do the cheats, charlatans, and scoundrels. Someofthese exploit the situation for their own gain; others gofurther and take advantage of the trust of others. In therush to print, and the hopes of attaining prestige, unscru-pulous authors can place identical or near-identical arti-cles in multiple journals. Where the journals themselvesare not providing rigorous peer review and editorial over-sight (and, admittedly, some may not be providing any atall), the rules of academic engagement are thus broken.”24

Some publishers use titles claiming American or Euro-pean origin when, in fact, there is no association at all bygeography or academics. Coyle posited, “Thewillingnessto put one’s name on a journal that is not following bestpractices in publishing is a moral failure in academe thatneeds to be addressed at an institutional level. It is notenough to lend your name to the board of a journal, addingto your own CV; such a position should only be taken bythose willing to work toward the development of qualityscholarly research and publication.”

However, much like the advent of unwanted spam,phishing, virus attacks, and hacking in the Internet age, theonce-sacrosanct principle of the “international, scientific,


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peer-reviewed journal” has now, in many cases, becomesuspect.25The issues are not aboutOA journalsper se; theyare about maintaining quality control in peer review andpublishing processes. In 2009, an editor-in-chief resignedfrom The Open Information Science Journal published byBentham Science Publishing after the publisher accepteda hoax article without his knowledge.26 The authors hadsubmitted a paper that was prepared with software thatgenerates grammatically correct but nonsensical text.

The success of major OA publishers resulted in an-other deceptive practice called “citation stacking.” Onesuch case was exposed after several Brazilian editors con-spired to publish articles containing hundreds of referencesto papers in each other’s journals in order to elevate thejournals’ impact factors.27, 28 This practice stems from thenotion that important articles are likely to be published injournals with high impact factors. They initially avoideddetection by not citing papers published by their own jour-nals, until June 19, 2013, when Thomson Reuters, the firmthat publishes the impact factor for scientific journals,revealed the scam.

In a similar fashion, 6 documents authored by a fic-titious author were uploaded to an institutional website,each with 129 references including references to all of thepublications of a research group at the university.29 Asexpected, Google Scholar indexed these articles on theirdomain, and Google Metrics added citations for the au-thors referenced in the 6 documents. This resulted in 774additional citations for the 47 members of the researchgroup and 52 journals. Google Scholar and Google Met-rics did not detect these false documents and citations. It isnot difficult to imagine with the pressure of tenure andpromotion that aspiring academics might be persuaded topublish in a journal with questionable aims.

FRAUDULENT CONFERENCESPredatory publishers obtain e-mail addresses for sci-

entists and faculty members and send requests to publishor serve on editorial boards of new OA journals. The NewYork Times reported that scientists recruited to appear ata conference called Entomology-2013 mistakenly be-lieved they were to make a presentation to the leadingprofessional association of entomologists.30 In fact, theprestigious conference was named Entomology 2013(without the hyphen). The speakers for the fraudulentconference were recruited by e-mail and later chargeda fee for the privilege. Most of those who paid the re-gistration fee were offered the opportunity to make a pre-sentation that could be used for resume purposes if theychose to do so. Fraudulent conferences take advantage ofscholars for reasons similar to electronic publication:profitability for the hosting “organization” and the desire

for recognition by the party invited tomake a presentationor chair a round table discussion.

There is now a blog for bogus conferences.31 BothBeall’s blog and The Chronicle of Higher Educationwarnreaders about bogus conferences that may use the names ofscientists without their permission to invite participants totheir meetings, promote their meetings by giving themnames that aredeceptively similar to otherwell-establishedmeetings, and refuse to refund registration fees, even if themeetings are cancelled.32 Another website listing bogusconferences is called Con-ferences.33

DISCUSSIONMisconduct undermines public trust in the validity of

peer reviewand scientific publication, and legitimate pub-lishers and bibliometric analysts are concerned. Authorsand reviewersmaywant to become as informed about thisthreat to scholarly credibility as publishers and bibliomet-ric analysts are.34 Self-regulation of scientific integrity isaccomplished through peer review and publication stan-dards. Guidelines for journal editors have been publishedby the Committee on Publication Ethics, the InternationalCommittee of Medical Journal Editors(ICMJE), theWorld Association of Medical Editors, the EQUATORNetwork (Enhancing the Quality and Transparency ofHealth Research), the Council of Science Editors, andthe Office of Research Integrity, among others.35

Blackwell Publishing stated in its best practiceguidelines for publication ethics that sources of fundingshould always be revealed.34 Journal editors may want toconsider adopting the ICMJE authorship criteria, whichstate that authorship credit should be based on substantialcontributions to conception and design, acquisition ofdata, analysis and interpretation of data, article draftingor critical revising, and final approval of the version to bepublished. Blackwell includes other suggestions, such asspecific instructions regarding redundant publication.Clinical trials should be registered in free clinical trialregistries. Authors should state that their study was ap-proved by the relevant research ethics committee or in-stitutional review board, and if animals are used, animalcare should be described. Consent should be obtainedfrom study participants for data or photographs.35

Lovejoy et al recognized that while reviewing pro-posed manuscripts is time-consuming, it can also be intel-lectually stimulating, and provided guidance for novice aswell as seasoned reviewers.36 Several recommendationsfor novice reviewers bear repeating, such as identifyinga small number of areas of expertise, preferably in thosein which they have published, and disclosing potential fi-nancial biases, disagreementwithmethodology or content,and recognition that a colleague or other individual close to


4

the reviewer is the author. Lovejoy also recommended thatreviewers read additional literature even though that isnormallynot expected, that they includea recommendationto publish or not in responses to the journal editor andnot toauthors, and that comments to authors should be phrased ina respectful tone.

When considering author-pay online publishing andconference invitations from unknown organizations, po-tential authors may want to assure that the publisher orjournal is not on Beall’s list, and if it is, read Beall’s com-ments and any responses from the publisher or editor. Thesame principles can be applied to conferences not associ-ated with familiar organizations. Many OA publishers arenew and aim for the highest ethical standards; nonetheless,diligence can be applied to avoid journals where authorspay regardless of ultimate acceptance and to withholdpayment until constructive criticism is received from atleast 2 reviewers.

Finally, at the institutional level, individuals andcommittees charged with evaluating the qualificationsof candidates in the processes of hiring and promotionmay also want to become as informed as possible of thevaried quality of peer review in the current environment.People with budgetary oversight should to considerwhether publishing fees and conference fees are spentwith due diligencewhen facultymembers propose to pub-lish or attend conferences.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe author would like to thank Charles Douglas, PhD,

Mark C. Granberry, PharmD, Catherine Pepper, MLIS,MPH, andMary L. Chavez, PharmD of Texas A&MHealthScience Center for their valuable comments.

REFERENCES1. Munroe R. The rise of open access. Science. 2013;342(6154):58-9.2. NIH Public Access Policy Details, National Institutes of Health.http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm. Accessed Jan. 27, 2014.3. Seber P. Open Access Overview. 2013. http://legacy.earlham.edu/;peters/fos/overview.htm. Accessed February 17, 2014.4. Creative Commons. http://us.creativecommons.org/AccessedMay 19, 2014.5. Directory of Open Access Journals. http://doaj.org/. AccessedMarch 28, 2014.6. Laakso M, Welling P, Bukvova H, Nyman L, Bjork B-C, HedlundT. The development of open access journal publishing from 1993 to2009. PLoS ONE. Vol. 6; 2011:e20961.7. Odell J, Whipple EC. The Changing Landscape of ScholarlyPublishing: Will Radiation Research Survive? Radiat Res. 2013;180(4):335-9.8. Prosser D. Between a rock and a hard place: the big squeeze forsmall publishers. Learn Publ. 2004;17(1):17-22.9. Lewin DI. Online science journals: a net gain? http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-3.4/lewin.html. Accessed March 29,2014.

10. Van Noorden R. Open access: The true cost of sciencepublishing. Nature. 2013;495(7442):426-9.11. Sabharwal S, Patel N, Johal K. Open access publishing: a study

of current practices in orthopaedic research. Int Orthop. Jan 32014.12. Grainger D. Peer review as professional responsibility: a quality

control system only as good as the participants. Biomaterials.2007;28(34):5199-203.13. Baxt WG, Waeckerle JF, Berlin JA, Callaham ML. WhoReviews the Reviewers? Feasibility of Using a Fictitious Manuscript

to Evaluate Peer Reviewer Performance. Annals of EmergencyMedicine. 9// 1998;32(3):310-7.14. Squazzoni F, Gandelli C. Saint Matthew strikes again: An agent-

based model of peer review and the scientific community structure.Journal of Informetrics.4// 2012;6(2):265-75.15. Danthi N, Wu CO, Shi P, Lauer M. Percentile ranking andcitation impact of a large cohort of National Heart, Lung, and Blood

Institute-funded cardiovascular R01 grants. Circulation research.Feb 14 2014;114(4):600-6.16. Fisher RS, Powers LE. Peer-reviewed publication: a view from

inside. Epilepsia. 2004;45(8):889-94.17. Bordage G. Reasons reviewers reject and accept manuscripts: thestrengths and weaknesses in medical education reports. Acad Med.Sep 2001;76(9):889-96.18. Peer-to-Peer Blog. NatureInsight. http://blogs.nature.com/peer-to-peer/. Accessed March 29, 2014.19. Beall J. Predatory publishers are corrupting open access. Nature

News. 2012;489:179.20. Bohannon J. Who’s afraid of peer review? Science. 2013;342(6154):60-5.21. Beall J. Scholarly Open Access. http://scholarlyoa.com.

Accessed February 4, 2014.22. Beall J. Five Scholarly Open Access Publishers. The CharlestonAdvisor. 2012;13:5-10.23. Bjork B-C, Solomon, D. Open access versus subscriptionjournals: a comparison of scientific impact. BMC Med.2012;10:73.24. Coyle K. Predatory Publishers j Peer to Peer Review. http://lj.

libraryjournal.com/2013/04/opinion/peer-to-peer-review/predatory-publishers-peer-to-peer-review/. Accessed February 5, 2014.25. Haug C. The downside of open-access publishing. The New

England journal of medicine. 2013;368(9):791-3.26. Gilbert N. Editor will quit over hoax paper. Nature News. http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090615/full/news.2009.571.html.Accessed February 5, 2014.27. Van Noorden R. Brazilian citation scheme outed. Nature News.2013;500:510.28. Van Noorden R. Record number of journals banned for boosting

impact factor with self-citations. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/06/record-number-of-journals-banned-for-boosting-impact-factor-with-self-citations.html. Accessed February 5, 2014.29. Delgado Lopez-Cozar E, Robinson-Garcıa N, Torres-Salinas D.

The Google scholar experiment: How to index false papers andmanipulate bibliometric indicators. Journal of the Association forInformation Science and Technology. 2014;65(3):446-54.30. Kolata G. Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too).http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html?_r52&. AccessedFebruary 7, 2014.31. Bogus Conferences. http://bogus-conferences.blogspot.com/.Accessed February 17, 2014.


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32. Brooks M. Red-Flag Conferences, The Chronicle of HigherEducation. March 26, 2009. Available at: https://chronicle.com/article/Red-Flag-Conferences/44795/. Accessed February 7,2014.33. Con-ferences. www.scamorama.com. Accessed February 4,2014.34. Graf C, Wager E, Bowman A, Fiack S, Scott-Lichter D,Robinson A. Best Practice Guidelines on Publication Ethics:

a publisher’s perspective. International journal of clinical practiceSupplement. Jan 2007(152):1-26.35. Roberts J. An Author’s Guide to Publication Ethics: A Review ofEmerging Standards in Biomedical Journals. Headache: The Journalof Head & Face Pain. 2009;49(4):578-89.36. Lovejoy TI, Revenson TA, France CR. Reviewing manuscriptsfor peer-review journals: a primer for novice and seasoned reviewers.Ann Behav Med. Aug 2011;42(1):1-13.


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The citation for the next article is: Dobusch. L. and Heimstädt, M. (2019) Predatory publishing in management research: A call for open peer review, Management Learning, 50(5): 607-619. DOI: 10.1177/1350507619878820

https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507619878820

Management Learning2019, Vol. 50(5) 607 –619

© The Author(s) 2019

Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissionsDOI: 10.1177/1350507619878820

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Predatory publishing in management research: A call for open peer review

Leonhard DobuschUniversity of Innsbruck, Austria

Maximilian HeimstädtWitten/Herdecke University, Germany

AbstractPredatory journals have emerged as an unintended consequence of the Open Access paradigm. Predatory journals only supposedly or very superficially conduct peer review and accept manuscripts within days to skim off publication fees. In this provocation piece, we first explain how predatory journals exploit deficiencies of the traditional peer review process in times of Open Access publishing. We then explain two ways in which predatory journals may harm the management discipline: as an infrastructure for the dissemination of pseudo-science and as a vehicle to portray management research as pseudo-scientific. Analyzing data from a journal blacklist, we show that without the ability to validate their claims to conduct peer review, most of the 639 predatory management journals are quite difficult to demarcate from serious journals. To address this problem, we propose open peer review as a new governance mechanism for management journals. By making parts of their peer review process more transparent and inclusive, reputable journals can differentiate themselves from predatory journals and additionally contribute to a more developmental reviewing culture. Eventually, we discuss ways in which editors, reviewers, and authors can advocate reform of peer review.

KeywordsDialogue, open peer review, open science, predatory journals, predatory publishing, transparency

The rise of predatory publishing

Academic publishing has not broken, but bent. Although the major academic publishing houses still make money by selling subscriptions to the proprietary content of their journals, many of them have also developed new business models around openly licensed, non-proprietary content. Through so-called “Gold” or “Hybrid Open Access” options, publishers collect fees to make articles openly

Corresponding author:Maximilian Heimstädt, Reinhard Mohn Institute of Management, Witten/Herdecke University, Alfred-Herrhausen-Straße 50, 58448 Witten, Germany. Email: [email protected]

878820 MLQ0010.1177/1350507619878820Management LearningDobusch and Heimstädtresearch-article2019

Provocations to Debate

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608 Management Learning 50(5)

available to anyone. Such Article Processing Charges (APCs) are paid by the authors of a manu-script, their institutions, or third-party funding bodies. Open Access publishing has the potential to make the dissemination of academic knowledge faster and more equal, since new results are imme-diately available to readers around the world, independent of their ability to financially contribute to the academic publishing system (Suber, 2016). However, the APC-based Open Access system also brings new problems for academic knowledge production. One of them is the rise of predatory Open Access journals (Harzing and Adler, 2016).

Predatory Open Access journals accept submitted manuscripts very quickly (sometimes within a few days) and only supposedly or very superficially conduct peer review, in order to skim off as many APCs as possible (Xia, 2015). The emergence of predatory Open Access journals is fueled by growing institutional Open Access funds and growing pressure on academics worldwide to publish in international and peer reviewed journals (Beall, 2013, 2018; Djuric, 2015; Omobowale et al., 2014). Predatory publishing surfaces problems that arise from path dependencies and market concentration in the academic publishing business. It also makes visible problems with the global institutionalization of peer review, which over the last decades has developed into “a unifying principle for a remarkably fragmented [academic] field” (Biagioli, 2002: 34). The more the ideal of international peer review gets exported into academic fields that have traditionally assessed academic quality through other means (e.g. in the Global South), the greater the demand for pub-lishing outlets that are able to link local cultures of knowledge production with the ideal of inter-national, blinded peer review.

Since the early 2000s, the number of Open Access journals has increased rapidly. In 2002, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 33 journals. In 2019, it lists about 12,000 repu-table journals. With a temporal lack, this growth has been matched by the market for predatory journals as well. Based on estimations, the “population” of 1800 predatory journals in 2010 has grown to more than 8000 in 2014. For the year 2014, Shen and Björk (2015) estimated the size of the predatory publishing market at around 74 million USD, compared to 244 million USD for repu-table Open Access journals and 10.5 billion USD for the entire global subscription market for scholarly journals.

To date, most research on predatory publishing has focused on the natural and life sciences. With this provocation piece, we intend to fuel a nascent debate on predatory publishing in the large field of management research. Although reflexive debates about the methods, tools, and infrastruc-tures of knowledge production are an integral part of management research, management scholars only recently began to examine the implications of Open Access publishing for their field (Beverungen et al., 2012; Thananusak and Ansari, 2019). Although most of these accounts praise the potentials of Open Access outlined above, they also agree that in order to address its challenges, management scholarship needs “new governance mechanisms to control and guarantee the quality of such new publishing options” (Harzing and Adler, 2016: 156). In this context, predatory Open Access journals manifest the more fundamental question of what makes a “qualitative” contribu-tion and the debate about the legitimacy of dominant, mostly Western ideals of knowledge produc-tion and evaluation vis-à-vis alternative epistemological ideals (e.g. Grey, 2009; Wedlin, 2011).

In this article, we respond to this call for new governance mechanisms in four steps. First, we outline the most pervasive threats that predatory publishing poses for management research. Second, we empirically assess the spread of “predators” in the field of management journals and find that it is about time to launch measures for population control. Third, we propose open peer review as a new mechanism to govern the production of management knowledge. Open peer review, we argue, comes with two benefits to our profession: increased transparency of “serious” peer review makes it easier to identify and de-legitimize predatory journals, which are unable to create transparency of their “fake” peer review. Increased dialogue between authors, editors,

Dobusch and Heimstädt 609

reviewers, and other interested parties can increase rigor and relevance of management research. Eventually, we conclude with a discussion on the more general question how digital transforma-tions (including the ones underlying Open Access publishing) change the dynamics of academic knowledge production.

Threats of predatory publishing for management research

Why should management research care about predatory publishing? And are there threats of predatory publishing that are specific to management research as a social science, in contrast to the natural and life sciences? Besides the obvious criticism that predatory journals hunt for resources especially in countries that lack sufficient academic funding anyway (Omobowale et al., 2014), we see two more ways in which predatory journals can harm our academic com-munity. Both ways are directly linked to what the philosophy of science describes as the “prob-lem of demarcation” (Popper, 1934): the question on how to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate scientific knowledge.

First, predatory journals are a threat to the field of management research because they can be used strategically to legitimize management ideologies, morally questionable business models, or discriminatory HR practices. When journals claim to perform peer review, but refrain from doing so, they provide an ideal infrastructure for the “sciencewashing” of idiosyncratic ideas. While members of the academic community can at least draw on the tacit reputation of a journal as an indicator of academic quality (which of course is also not without caveats, see Macdonald and Kam, 2007), non-academic actors such as journalists might lack this in-depth knowledge about a domain and trust the existence of the peer review label as a signifier for academic rigor. While it seems unlikely that members of a non-academic audience directly import concepts or practices from such journals, the proliferation of problematic ideas and terminology (e.g. racist or sexist) in ostensibly peer reviewed journals might shift normative baselines for what can and cannot be said in other social arenas including reputable journals.

Second, predatory journals are a threat because they can be used to de-legitimize the manage-ment discipline (or sub-disciplines) through bogus articles. In 1996, the US-American physicist Alan Sokal famously published a bogus article in the academic journal Social Text (Sokal, 1996b), which he subsequently publicly disclosed as a performative act to criticize the intellectual rigor of postmodern cultural studies (“Sokal affair”; Sokal, 1996a). In a similar but more recent case, the philosopher Peter Boghossian and the mathematician James Lindsay orchestrated an attack on the gender studies discipline with their bogus article “The conceptual penis as a social construct,” which they published in the interdisciplinary and seemingly predatory journal Cogent Social Sciences (Boghossian and Lindsay, 2017). In their attempt to de-legitimize the discipline, they directed attention to an overly shallow and unscientific peer review, but failed to reflect or maybe even deliberately obfuscated the questionable nature of the journal they targeted. Due to editorial decisions, fields like gender studies are marginalized in reputable journals as well. For example, we find polemic attacks on certain fields in both, reputable and predatory journals. However, the case of the “conceptual penis” shows that predatory journals can additionally be used as a stage on which strategic hoaxes can be performed quite easily. The subliminal skepticism toward certain fields, fostered by the exclusionist practices of reputable journals, creates a receptive audience for such hoaxes within and beyond academia.

Both threats, the legitimation of non-scientific ideas and the de-legitimation of the discipline as non-scientific, arise from the paradoxical situation that the more is known about predatory jour-nals, the more difficult it seems to demarcate them from (some) reputable journals (Teixeira da Silva, 2017). To illustrate why new governance mechanisms for the production of management


knowledge are needed, we propose a classification of Open Access journals based on their operat-ing procedures (Table 1). While all three types in our classification show below-average quality, only junk and fake journals are predatory in nature. The classification hence points to the govern-ance of the peer review process as a way to curb the rise of predatory journals.

Aspirant journals are of below-average academic quality, mainly because they are not able to build up a relevant community, attract respected editors and reviewers, and therefore, high-quality manuscripts. Aspirant journals have a below-average peer review, but are not predatory. Even though they charge APCs, they do so not exclusively to maximize profits, but have an academic agenda, as well. An example of an aspirant journal could be some student-run journal with scarce resources (Yeates, 2016).

Junk journals charge APCs to publish a manuscript after a short turnaround time. Publication is preceded by a formal but superficial peer review. Short, generic and predominantly positive reports are presented to the authors. However, the manuscript is generally accepted without major changes. Junk journals are primarily profit-driven and generally lack an academic agenda. Prime examples of junk journals are many of those published by the Indian publishing house OMICS (Butler, 2013).

Fake journals do not conduct any peer review (although this may be claimed in the external presentation), but charge APCs to publish a manuscript. In 2013, the biologist John Bohannon submitted an error-ridden study on a new cancer drug he had ostensibly developed to 304 suspi-cious journals. A total of 157 of them either accepted the manuscript for further review or immedi-ate publication, the latter indicating that no peer review has taken place at all (Bohannon, 2013). Junk and fake journals conduct aggressive spamming to generate manuscripts and names for edito-rial boards. Sometimes, such journals even design a journal website that looks very similar to that of a respectable journal—a practice referred to as “hijacking” (Lukić et al., 2014). For junk and fake journals, the alleged peer review is only a necessary and useful façade for skimming off APCs. As Harzing and Adler (2016) put it, “the primary goal of the journals does not appear to be the advancement of science and scholarly discourse, at least not in ways that conventional scholars would recognize as valid” (p. 147).

Disciplinary numbers: an overview of predatory management journals

Predatory publishing is not an uncontroversial issue. Although the volume of articles in predatory journals increased from 53,000 to 420,000 per year between 2010 and 2014 (Shen and Björk, 2015), some commentators still consider the issue of predatory journals as merely a “storm in a teacup,” which does not require broader professional attention (Leininger, 2018). We therefore use this section to present some disciplinary numbers: descriptive statistics on predatory journals in the management discipline, which substantiate our call for disciplining peer review anew.

In 2010, the librarian Jeffrey Beall, a fierce critic of the deficiencies of the Open Access para-digm, began to assemble a list of potentially predatory publishers and journals based on his own

Table 1. Types of Open Access journals with below-average quality.

Journal type Characteristics Orientation

Aspirant Journal Sometimes APCs, below-average peer review Primarily science-drivenJunk Journal APCs, formal but superficial peer review Primarily profit-drivenFake Journal APCs, no peer review Purely profit-driven


research and secondary data (“Beall’s List”). After Beall ended his project under unclear circum-stances in 2017, the scholarly analytics company Cabells launched a blacklist with initially 8300 academic journals that fail on basic quality criteria (Bisaccio, 2018). Working on this provocation piece, Cabells granted us access to a dataset of all journals on the blacklist that were categorized as relating to the field of “management” on 13 September 2018. A journal is added to the blacklist when it meets one of 66 blacklist criteria set by Cabells. The dataset we obtained consisted of 661 Open Access management journals (out of a total number of 7790 Open Access journals on the list). After reducing the blacklist criteria to those 28 that related directly to the quality of peer review, we were left with 639 entries, which we analyzed further.1

From this pre-processed dataset, we first calculated the number of violations (i.e. criteria that were met) per journal (Figure 1). The average number of violations per journal is 2.49, with a median of two violations per journal. Although we found one journal with eight violations and one with seven violations (0.15%), the larger part of journals in our dataset had three (118 journals, 18.46%), two (293 journals, 37.4%), or only one violation (113 journals, 17.68%). Subsequently, we calculated the frequency of individual violations across our dataset (Figure 2). The most fre-quent violations among the blacklisted management journals are a missing peer review policy on the journal’s website (344), the absence of an editor or editorial board on the journal’s website (301), and prominently displayed announcements of rapid publication or unusually quick peer review (255).

Our analysis shows that predatory management journals make an impressive 8.5 percent of all predatory Open Access journals on the blacklist. However, our analysis further suggests that the real number of predatory management journals might be even higher than the 639 we worked with. Predatory journals do their best to obscure their predatory nature. As the distribution of blacklist violations shows (Figure 1), only very few of them fail miserably in pretending to be a reputable outlet. The great majority only ended up on the blacklist due to one or two flaws in their façade. Of course, blacklists need to be consulted with great care. However, even if the list at hand contains a few false positives (“aspirant journals” that at least attempt to organize serious peer review), the skewed distribution suggests that there is a considerable number of false negatives (“junk” and “fake journals” that maintain the façade of a reputable peer review). Thus, services like Cabells or thinkchecksubmit.org are valuable defensive initiatives that can help academics to navigate around predatory Open Access journals. But their assessment of journals is limited to publicly available information and clues regarding credibility. In the following, we propose another solution to the

Figure 1. Distribution of blacklist violations among Open Access management journals (in %).


problem of predatory publishing that puts reputable journals in a more offensive position by chang-ing the rules of the peer review game.

Why we need open peer review

Ever since we started playing the “game of peer review” (Raelin, 2008), we have been debating its rules. In her essay Toward a bill of rights for manuscript submitters, Judith Clair (2015) argues that authors should be guaranteed a right to move through the review process without excessive delay, as well as a right to an evaluation based on objective criteria. As we have shown above, predatory publishing has bent the rules of peer review in a way that the right to timeliness has completely forced aside the right to an objective evaluation. What we need is an adjustment to the rules of the peer review game that balances out both rights under the new paradigm of Open Access and APC-based business models. In this section, we therefore propose open peer review (OPR) as a set practice that can curb predatory journals and at the same time increase rigor and relevance of repu-table management research.

Ideas for more open forms of peer review have spawned from the critique of double-blind peer review, which developed in the natural sciences after the Second World War and was adopted by many other fields including management research over the second-half of the 20th century (Spier, 2002). In the field of management research, issues of recurrent concern include the unreliability, inconsistency, delay, unaccountability, or social biases of double-blind peer review (Osterloh and Kieser, 2015). Since the early 1990s scholars across fields have experi-mented with ways in which the double-blindness could be opened up in order to mediate these problems. From these experiments, first the label and then a number of definitions for OPR have emerged. Reviewing 122 of these definitions, Ross-Hellauer (2017) identified seven specific OPR practices (Table 2).

Against the backdrop of predatory publishing, we find that Ross-Hellauer’s OPR practices can be grouped into two categories, each of them with their own implications for the dynamics of knowledge production. Some OPR practices provide outsiders with a vista into the peer review process. Other OPR practices modulate existing or create new ways of communicating between authors, editors, reviewers, and other interested parties. As a strategic response for reputable jour-nals in opposition to predatory journals, practices of transparent peer review seem particularly adept. To foster developmental reviewing and hence to improve rigor and relevance of manage-ment scholarship, practices of dialogical peer review seem fruitful.

Figure 2. Most frequent blacklist violations among Open Access management journals.


Transparent peer review: curbing predatory journals

Transparent peer review practices can be a means for reputable journals to differentiate themselves from predatory journals. When reputable journals decide to make visible the laborious work of authors, reviewers, and editors, predatory journals will not be able to match these efforts. It thus becomes easier to identify and de-legitimize journals that lack proper peer review. To figure out which form of visibility can best be introduced to their community, we propose that journals can experiment with open identities, open reports, and some types of open platforms.

Open identities is an alternative to the prevailing anonymity in the peer review process. In most fields, peer review is organized as a single-blind or double-blind process. To our knowledge, most management journals follow a double-blind policy, where reviewers and authors do not know the others’ identities, but where editors are known to all parties. When practicing open identities in peer review, authors and reviewers know each other’s identities. Once an article is published, it would not only indicate the name of its authors but also of the reviewers that had commented on the manuscripts. An alternative would be to disclose not the name of the reviewer and author, but the name of the reviewer’s institution, department, or working group. We assume that fake journals will not be willing to disclose the identities of their reviewers, as this would reveal their fictional-ity, unsuitability, or overload. When the practice of open identities further requires naming an institutional website or an ORCID ID, faking reviewer identities can be rendered discouragingly “costly” for predatory publishers. As an additional effect to the demarcation of predatory journals, open identities can help marginalized scholars to mobilize and push for greater representation in the reviewer pools of reputable journals. In the field of management research, it is already good practice for many established journals to publish a list of participating reviewers at the end of a year. We therefore believe that the step toward open identities seems smaller than in the past. Also, although management journals still maintain the façade of double-blind review, the growing spe-cialization of subfields and the fact that many titles of conference presentations (e.g. the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management) and working papers are published on the Internet (e.g. on SocArXiv), reviewers can often infer the author of a manuscript they are review-ing anyway, while authors have little chance to infer who is reviewing their papers.

Open reports mean that full reviews or summaries are published alongside the final journal article. While this might be difficult for print versions of journal articles, it seems unproblematic to

Table 2. Open peer review practices.

Practice Description

Transparent peer review Open identities Authors and reviewers know each other’s identities. Open reports Reports are published together with the accepted manuscript. Open platforms Review is not organized by the issuing journal, but by another organization.Dialogical peer review Open participation All members of the wider community can review an unpublished manuscript. Open interactions Direct reciprocal discussion between authors and reviewers is possible and

is promoted. Open pre-review

manuscriptsOriginal manuscripts are made available on preprint servers before the review process begins.

Open final-version commenting

Open commenting on the final manuscript is possible.

Source: Adapted from Ross-Hellauer (2017).


publish them online. Many journals in the field of management already invite authors to enhance their accepted manuscript with comprehensive online appendixes and multimedia content (e.g. Academy of Management Discoveries). We can assume that the more reputable journals publish reviews alongside full articles, the more pressure will be exerted on predatory journals, as showing their overly shallow reviews or admitting the nonexistence of those might not only discredit them but also have legal consequences. To mitigate some of the threats of predatory publishing (e.g. sciencewashing) through open reports, journalists and practitioners would need to internalize open reports as an indicator of trustworthiness. Open reviews could be combined with open identities for published articles. This way, the quality of a review could directly enhance the reputation of a reviewer. However, to fight off predatory journals, open review would also be effective when the identities of reviewers remain undisclosed. In management research, it is already common practice for research groups to discuss reviews that their members have received and need to respond to, for example, in PhD seminars on academic writing or at workshops of local research networks like Organisation Theory Research Group (OTREG) in the United Kingdom.

Open platforms mean that the peer review is facilitated by an organizational entity other than the journal in which an article is to be published. In this case, authors submit their articles to independent platforms, which organize the review process. Journals then receive these reviews from the platform instead of soliciting them on their own. The link between journal and platform can be organized in different ways. On the one hand, it is possible for platforms to have partner journals that can browse the reviews and make publication offers. On the other hand, it is possible for the platform to forward the reviews to the author’s preferred journal. With regard to predatory journals, we assume that a larger part of APCs in this model will be shifted to the review plat-forms, making the academic publishing market less attractive for predatory journals. Furthermore, we imagine that partnering with an independent platform can become a quality label for academic journals, shifting signaling power from the mere label of peer review toward the reputation of such platforms. To avoid that platforms simply reproduce power structures from the field of repu-table journals (e.g. composition of reviewer pools), their funding should be independent from such journals and scholarly associations. For example, OPR platforms could follow the model of the Open Library of Humanities, which is funded through grants and a membership model for libraries and other research institutions. In the field of management, independent platforms are used increasingly to incentivize reviewers, by turning reviews into a measurable research output. The platform Publons, already collects and verifies information on reviews and reviewers. Reviewer profiles can then be added to a CV and included as a criterion in formal selection and tenure processes.

Dialogical peer review: fostering rigor and relevance

So far, calls for more developmental and less punitive reviewing have focused on the need for individual “skills, roles, and techniques” (Ragins, 2018: 159). We think that dialogical peer review practices are an organizational means to foster developmental reviews and hence to create better and more interesting research articles. Four dialogical peer review practices that improve commu-nication between authors and other participants in the review process are open participation, open interaction, open pre-review manuscripts, and open final-version commenting.

Open participation allows the wider academic community and other interested parties to con-tribute to the review process. These reviewers can contribute either full, structured reviews or shorter comments that complement rather than replace formal, invited review reports. Commenting can either be open to anyone and without the need to provide name, or require verification such as a minimum number of published articles and a login with one’s full name (e.g. through an ORCID


ID). Research on open participation has shown that such practices, however, require some form of closure to avoid forms of “exclusionary openness” (Dobusch et al., 2019). To avoid “trolling” and to realize the positive potential of open participation in peer review, this practice would require editors or journal administrators to moderate incoming comments and reviews. Open participation has been described as an OPR practice that is particularly suited to social sciences, as reviewing here puts great emphasis on “originality, creativity, depth and cogency of argument, and the ability to develop and communicate new connections across and additions to existing texts and ideas” (Ross-Hellauer, 2017). Since this description holds true for a large part of management research, we think that open participation could significantly enhance the quality and relevance of scholar-ship through broader dialogue (Bornmann et al., 2012; Fitzpatrick and Santo, 2012). Furthermore, management education has always been interested in strong and vivid links to practitioners. Many papers in management research—also in high-reputation journals—are co-authored by theoreti-cally inclined practitioners. Why should these community members be excluded from peer review?

Open interaction means that direct reciprocal discussion between reviewers, authors, and edi-tors is encouraged. One way of interacting more openly is that reviewers can comment on each other’s reviews before they get sent to the author(s). Alternatively, reviewers could be required to come to a unilateral decision, based on which the editor compiles a single peer review letter. This variant addresses the problems many authors face when receiving contradictory reviews of their manuscripts and has already been implemented by the journal eLife (Schekman et al., 2013). In its arguably most open variant, authors, reviewers, and one or more of the editors would come together in an interactive collaboration stage of the peer review process. Such a model has been tested by the publisher Frontiers (2016). In many management journals, it is already the case that authors can reach out to editors for soft guidance on how to approach issues in their reviews, or how to handle contradictory demands from the reviewers. Open interaction could formalize these informal pro-cesses, making them more accessible for all members of the peer review system, especially for junior scholars who might be insecure about whether contacting the editor is appropriate or not.

Open pre-review manuscripts means that authors make their manuscripts immediately acces-sible via the Internet, either in advance, or in synchrony with formal peer review procedures. Many preprint servers (SSRN or SocArXiv for management research), institutional repositories (LSE Research Online), catch-all repositories (Zenodo, Figshare) and some publisher-hosted repositories (PeerJ Preprints) allow authors to immediately make their work available. Open pre-review is a practice that is complementary to the traditional review process, while effectively turning double-blind into single-blind reviewing. By publishing their manuscripts online, the process of developing a final article can become more developmental, as scholars can collect broader feedback on their unpublished manuscript and use this feedback when redrafting the paper as part of the formal review process. Open pre-review manuscripts could be a research practice independent of the formal review process; however, journals or reviewers could make the publication of open pre-review manuscripts a formal requirement (Kriegeskorte, 2012; Kriegeskorte et al., 2012).

Open final-version commenting, finally, invites scholars and members of the broader public to review or comment on the final “version of record” publication. The Internet has fostered many new ways to communicate and provide feedback on research output. Today, many journals offer commenting sections on published articles, although they are not heavily used (Walker and Rocha da Silva, 2015). However, what is very popular are academic social networks (Mendeley, ResearchGate, and Academia), Twitter and personal or institutional research blogs. In the field of management research, open final-version commenting could be a very helpful instrument to improve and develop review articles, for example, those published by the Academy of Management Annals. Through open final-version commenting, the authors could be pointed toward new and


relevant publications that would amend certain sections of the review (using tools like the annota-tion software hypothes.is). Changes in the article would be noted in a “log file” at the end or beginning of the article indicating the date and nature of the change. In this way, the relevance of comprehensive reviews could be increased, resources for new reviews could be saved, and entirely new reviews would only become necessary when taking a radically different angle on a certain body of knowledge. An established platform to allow for post-publication commenting is Pubpeer.

Changing some rules of knowledge production—for the better

Management research as an academic field is constantly concerned with the necessity and possibil-ity of meaningful engagement with practitioners and forms of knowledge that originate in praxis (Kieser et al., 2015). While many academics describe agonistic encounters with practitioner-out-siders as an opportunity for learning, the situation with predatory journals is different. Predatory journals challenge the establish regime of academic knowledge production from the inside. As we have shown above, predatory journals unveil a major deficiency of the peer review game: it is the façade, not the process that legitimates its outcome.

Kathy Dean and Jeanie Forray (2018), coeditors of the Journal of Management Education, have recently argued that “over a combined 15 years of experience as action editors and editors-in-chief, [they’ve] come to believe that peer review as it currently exists is unsustainable, and that this real-ity threatens the future of all academic scholarship” (p. 164). We agree with them and believe that the rise of predatory publishing should be a trigger to experiment with more open forms of peer review. OPR practice can not only curb predatory journals but also can lead to more rigorous (through dialogue within the academic community) and relevant (through dialogue with other interested parties) management research. We call upon our discipline to experiment with some of the practices outlined above rather than prematurely converging on any of them. A major reason for this is that OPR is not without risk. While there is debate about the general advantages and disad-vantages of each of the individual OPR practices (Ross-Hellauer, 2017), we see two challenges that are more specific to the management discipline.

On the one hand, OPR might evoke criticism on research methods from voices that have previ-ously not been raised. We assume that some methods despite being made transparent, remain incomprehensible to audiences outside thematic academic communities. Authors, reviewers, and editors together will then need to meet accusations of pseudo-science with explanations why some research questions demand methodologies that are less congruent with the public image of science than others. On the other hand, predatory journals could continue to exist despite serious journals adopting OPR practices. We should not assume that the adoption of OPR practices magically eradi-cate predatory journals. Rather, we understand OPR as a resource that journals, professional aca-demic associations, and funding institutions can use to de-legitimize predatory journals. While de-legitimation is already at work through tools such as blacklists, we think that OPR provides an even better tool because it does not involve the risk of erroneously classifying serious journals as predatory ones.

Calling out fake peer review, however, needs successful advocacy for OPR practices first. Different roles in the review process allow for different forms of advocacy work. Editors and edito-rial board members are in a favorable position to advocate for OPR, as they are the ones who have the authority to set the rules of the peer review game. In the well-documented case of the subscrip-tion-based linguistics journal Lingua, the entire editorial board resigned simultaneously just to collectively launch the new Open Access journal Glossa. Although we do not see OPR as a prob-lematic issue for academic publishers, editors can leverage such stories when facing resistance from publishers. For more traditional journals, it seems unlikely that the entire peer review will be


radically opened without piloting projects. We therefore recommend editors to advocate for experi-ments with openness in some supplementary section of the journal (e.g. essay or dialogue section). Reviewers are in a favorable position to advocate for OPR as well, especially when the work in a field that is relatively scarce in senior experts, but highly attractive to editors. In these cases, reviewers can make their willingness to review dependent on the condition that review reports and/or original manuscript are made openly available, as described above in the case of Nikolaus Kriegeskorte. At least, reviewers can individually set an example by publishing reviews on OPR platforms such as Publons.

On the first view, authors seem to be in an unfavorable position to advocate for OPR. Indeed, especially untenured early career scholars oftentimes feel unable to submit to any other than the few high-impact legacy journals in the field of management research. In the face of ever-increas-ing submission numbers for the leading management journals, requests for OPR might just result in an instant rejection. However, we think that researchers can advocate for more open forms of peer review in at least two ways. On the one hand, they can serve as ad hoc reviewers for journals that publish management research and already experiment with greater openness, such as Business Research or Ephemera. On the other hand, they can support candidates who run for positions in our professional bodies and who have expressed an interest in greater openness in academic pub-lishing. As formal representatives in these bodies, these candidates can substantially shape the course of the associated academic journals (e.g. Organization Studies, Academy of Management Journal).

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the valuable comments on earlier versions of the article from Katja Mayer as well as colleagues at the Workshop Organization in the German Academic Association for Business Research (WK ORG). The article also benefited from discussions, which the second author had as an Open Science Fellow of Wikimedia Deutschland, Stifterverband, and Volkswagenstiftung. We further thank the scholarly analytics firm Cabells for sharing parts of their journal blacklist data with us. Finally, we want to thank associ-ate editors Todd Bridgman and Emma Bell, as well as our two anonymous reviewers, whose comments have greatly benefited the article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Maximilian Heimstädt https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2786-8187

Note

1. The dataset, as well as a more detailed description on the data pre-processing and analysis, can be obtained from the authors on request.

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