Why should I be concerned about predatory journals, predatory conferences, and vanity presses?
Faculty should be concerned about having their work published in predatory publications for several reasons:
- These publishers aim to extract money from academics.
- Publishing in a predatory publication can have severe negative consequences for one's career.
- Faculty risk "wasting" their work on a publication that has very little academic reach or value.
What is a predatory journal?
A predatory journal is "a questionable business practice of charging fees to authors to publish their articles without standard editorial and publishing services provided by legitimate scholarly journals".
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What is a predatory conference?
"Predatory conferences exploit and profit from researchers eager to present their research at an ‘international’ conference. The conferences tend to be poorly organised and low-quality, with little or no peer review of submitted research. The conference organisers make money in the form of registration fees".
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What is a vanity press?
Vanity presses are "publishers that will charge the author a fee for publishing a book. [...] Generally these publishers do not have any interest in promoting and selling the book. Vanity publishers do not get their money from selling the book, but rather from selling the book production services to the author".
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