Beware of predatory journals

When I teach doctoral students, I usually ask them to compile a small corpus of example articles from journals in their field. With these corpora in hand, they explore the disciplinary conventions of articles in their fields--the phraseology, the organisation, the way the authors position themselves, and so on. However, students increasingly return to our classes with articles which instantly alarm me or the other participants. It may be the quality of the language is below the threshold that any peer-reviewed journal worth the paper its printed on would accept. Or there may be other, even more glaring clues, such as authors who are still in high school.

So what's going on? What is going on it seems is that the academic world, with so much as stake and with the proliferation of open access publishing, is ripe for rip-off schemes. Young, ambitious, sometimes naive researchers are especially easy prey. These predators set up illegitimate journals that look and sound real but will publish anything for a fee. Gina Kolata raised the alarm about these journals, as well as phony Conferences, in a New York Times article this year. Many of us receive daily span mail from these journals, inviting us to join the editorial board or publish with a guarantee of a review process that lasts only two weeks (by the way, why an English teacher would want to pay to be an editor of a mechanical engineering journal is a mystery to me).  Interestingly, according to the article, even experienced professors have been taken in and "trapped" on editoral boards by these journals. So if it sounds to good to be true, it is! The NY Times article points us to a useful resource if you want to check whether the journal you are reading or being solicited to publish in is a set-up: Jeffrey Beall has created a set of criteria for identifying a predatory journal and maintains a list here.