This guide is intended to provide information about predatory publishing. Deciding where to publish is the sole responsibility of an author. The content in this guide does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to replace the advice of legal counsel.
This guide is meant to serve as a quick and reliable predatory publishing reference for SHU faculty, staff, and students.
This guide will cover the following:
Common characteristics of predatory publishers versus the common characteristics of legitimate scholarly journals
Effective tools that you can use to evaluate journals and avoid potentially predatory publications
How to identify predatory conferences
General tips to help keep you and your work safe
Predatory publishers are businesses that solicit articles from students, faculty, and researchers who are under pressure to publish their research findings. They tend to prey on authors who need to fulfill tenure, grant, or graduation publishing requirements. These predatory publishers collect fees from authors without providing legitimate journal services such as peer-review.
They often pose as open access journals, since the open access publishing model covers costs by collecting fees from the authors (rather than by ad revenue or subscriptions). This, in turn, provides a large amount of opportunity for scam journals. Their ultimate goal is to make money, NOT to publish and foster scholarly research.
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