Grateful acknowledgement is given to the following for content and organizational strategies borrowed from their guides on predatory publishing:
Scholarly Publishing: Predatory Publishing by Ruth Bueter at Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library, George Washington University
Evaluating Open Access Journals by Lisa Palmer at Lamar Soutter Library, UMass Medical School
Scholarly Communication: Predatory Publishers by Rosemary Arneson at University of Mary Washington Libraries
While there are many high-quality, peer-reviewed open access publications, there are also open access publishers that engage in unethical practices.
"Predatory publishers" is a term used to describe opportunistic open access publishers that charge publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals. [1]
Predatory publishers share several characteristics:[2]