Predatory journals exploit structural weaknesses in scholarly publishing

The scholarly publishing process—from initial submission to final publication—has many weak points subject to exploitation [1]. Some open-access publishers have taken advantage of these vulnerabilities, profiting by cheating scholarly authors and the consumers of research, the readers. The open-access social movement has facilitated this exploitation [2], preferring to advance its ideology at the expense of good science. The result is that scholarly publishing is now operating in a crisis mode [3], with activist science and pseudo-science being presented as legitimate in scholarly literature. Academic evaluation is also suffering [4], with some researchers taking advantage of the easy acceptance the predatory publishers offer to quickly publish research articles, works that earn academic credit that lead to tenure and promotion and augment CVs shown to prospective employers. Before the advent of open-access journals, scholarly publishing was largely governed by a sustained implementation of the “gentlemen’s agreement,” which, according to Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online is “an agreement which is not enforceable at law, and which is only binding as a matter of honour” [5,6]. With open-access journals, readers and libraries no longer have a say on which journals succeed or fail, an important quality-control function that’s rapidly being lost. You cannot cancel a subscription to an open-access journal. Instead, the authors financing the publication of articles in open-access journals exercise the economic clout to determine thewinners. Increasingly, the winners are the journals selling quick and easy acceptance of submitted articles at low fees [7]. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the open-access publishingmodel, but to be successful, it must bemanaged properly, in a way that benefits science, those who carried