---
title: "Predatory publishing"
chunk: 4/7
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_publishing"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:28:22.490657+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Growth and structure ===
A study in 2015 found that predatory journals rapidly increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 active journals. Early on, publishers with more than 100 journals dominated the market, but since 2012 publishers in the 10–99 journal size category have captured the largest market share. As of 2022, almost one third of the 100 largest publishers (by journal count) could be deemed predatory. The regional distribution of both the publisher's country and authorship is highly skewed, with three-quarters of the authors from Asia or Africa. Authors paid an average fee of US $178 each for articles to be published rapidly without review, typically within two to three months of submission. As reported in 2019, some 5% of Italian researchers have published in predatory journals, with a third of those journals engaging in fraudulent editorial practices.

== Causes and impact ==
The root cause of exploitative practices is the author-facing article-processing charge (APC) business model, in which authors are charged to publish rather than to read. Such a model provides incentives for publishers to focus on the quantity of articles published, rather than their quality. APCs have gained increasing popularity in the last two decades as a business model for OA, due to the guaranteed revenue streams they offer, as well as a lack of competitive pricing within the OA market, which allows vendors full control over how much they choose to charge.
Ultimately, quality control relies on good editorial policies and their enforcement, and the conflict between rigorous scholarship and profit can be successfully managed by selecting which articles are published purely based on (peer-reviewed) methodological quality. Most OA publishers ensure their quality by registering their titles in the Directory of Open Access Journals and complying with a standardised set of conditions.
The majority of predatory OA publishers appear to be based in Asia and Africa, but in one study over half of authors publishing in them were found to be from "higher-income or upper-middle-income countries". It has been argued that authors who publish in predatory journals may do so unwittingly without actual unethical perspective, due to concerns that North American and European journals might be prejudiced against scholars from non-Western countries, high publication pressure or lack of research proficiency. Hence predatory publishing also questions the geopolitical and commercial context of scholarly knowledge production. Early career researchers are particularly vulnerable to predatory publishing, as they often face pressure to publish quickly to establish their academic careers. This, coupled with a lack of awareness of predatory practices, makes them more susceptible to exploitative publishers. Nigerian researchers, for example, publish in predatory journals due to the pressure to publish internationally while having little to no access to Western international journals, or due to the often higher APCs practiced by mainstream OA journals. More generally, the criteria adopted by high JIF journals, including the quality of the English language, the composition of the editorial board or the rigour of the peer review process itself tend to favour familiar content from the "centre" rather than the "periphery". It is thus important to distinguish between exploitative publishers and journals – whether OA or not – and legitimate OA initiatives with varying standards in digital publishing, but which may improve and disseminate epistemic contents.

== Response ==

=== Blacklists ===
Lists of journals or publishers deemed either acceptable or unacceptable have been published. Beall's List was an example of a free blacklist, and Cabells' Predatory Reports is an example of a paid blacklist database. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) recommends against blindly trusting any list of fake or predatory journals, especially if they do not publish the criteria by which journals are evaluated. Some lists of purported predatory publishers have been criticized for being based on the authors' personal judgement, rather than objective evidence.
Lists of acceptable sources, on the other hand, have been criticized as not being relevant to how academics evaluate journals.  Directory of Open Access Journals is an example of a free whitelist.  Other lists of pre-approved journals are available from large research funders.

==== Beall's List ====