The Myth of the 'Predatory Journal'

    At the time when I did independent scholarly research in mathematics several years ago I was briefed on the extreme importance of subscription-based journals and open-access journals and why I should try to steer clear of open access because they were more prone to being predatory journals. 

This is what I was told. However, the problem with this belief isn't so much about open-access journals being more predatory it's the mentality of "Publish or Perish" academia created in the first place that has caused many researchers today to not care about how "scholarly" the journal is they publish in. In order to strengthen your CV in academia as much as possible, publishing anywhere you can today is now a MUST. And open-access journals are the answer to the problem as long as you have the money.

Of course, open access is very attractive and appealing for a couple of reasons too:


1. Your work can be viewed and downloaded by anyone without a subscription pay wall.

2. Naturally, the peer review process will be more lenient on submitted papers. There is still a peer review process though. I just want to make that clear.


These reasons are why open-access journals have become much more popular in recent years. Though, the idea of 'predatory journals' came about through all of this to keep researchers in check with publishing almost exclusively to subscription-based journals. They have treated this like some religious 'tenet' within academia for a very long time and giving people thoughts that it's "more prestigious" and "this is the norm here." 

So, are 'predatory journals' really that predatory or are they just taking advantage of the idea to make your work completely free and open to the public with the cost of a fee? Personally, I prefer it that way. How many people do you know pay a monthly subscription for a scholarly journal just to read a paper that they'll probably get bored of half way through? Instead, it only makes sense to expand the amount of readers as much as possible and open access does just that. lots of more readers and downloads of your work is better than very few if that which you get with subscription-based journals today. 

I'm not saying that there aren't bad journals out there. There are but just like everything in life, there's always a bad apple or two out there in any occupation or business setting looking to screw you over in some way and you need to be aware of that because it's a fact of life.


Sources


  1.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3999612/

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