Having a web page with scientific articles isn’t all it takes to be a scientific journal, says Victor Morais.

Guest contributor Victor Morais

The number of open access journals available to scientists has grown enormously in recent years. They offer the possibility of fast and easy publishing to get research out in the world as soon as possible. Unfortunately, not all open access journals are as they appear.

Victor Morais

Every day, email invitations to new open access journals drop into my inbox. Recently I decided to investigate further. On the publisher’s site I found more than 30 journals covering a variety of areas, but fewer than half of them had published articles and none of them had more than 10 articles. There were more places to publish than there were publications!

I wondered if these journals were real. They could be predatory journals – a web page where scientists publish papers in a form more like a personal page or a blog than a legitimate scientific journal. The real purpose of a scientific journal is to share and preserve knowledge and to protect the minimum quality requirements of a scientific publication. If scientists publish their work on personal web pages, there are no quality controls and it’s not possible to guarantee the visibility or protection of articles. Predatory journals do not do the job of a scientific journal in terms of quality, visibility or preservation, and most of the time lack the peer review process that makes science reliable. As a researcher, how do I guarantee that as soon as I’m charged for publication, my work won’t be lost in the ether?

In my ensuing research, I found some interesting resources like Think. Check. Submit that give guidelines to choose the right journal. Here, I want to share some of the clues that helped me to distinguish between established, emerging and predatory journals.

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