Predatory Publishing

According to Elmore and Weston (2020), there are several free resources that can assist you in identifying and avoiding predatory journals.

• Beall's List - How to Identify Predatory Journals is a good article with criteria to consider when evaluating a journal.  It also has a journal evaluation tool where you score journals points based on certain characteristics.
• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): They define the best ways to practice scholarly publishing.  It also contains a database that has scholarly journals.
• ThinkCheckSubmit.org: This is a free website and public relations campaign in coalition with Open Access advocacy groups (Murphy, 2019).  The website contains tutorials on how to identify predatory publishers.  They have a journal evaluation checklist as well.  The goal is to educate researchers on the dangers of predatory publishing and the campaign aims to encourage preventative practices (Murphy, 2019).
• Transpose (TRANsparency in Scholarly Publishing for Open Scholarship Evolution): A database made available to the public in Google Docs that anyone can edit.  The database aims to get journals and publishers to verify the policies in the document, but will accept information from anyone.  It contains peer review and printing policies (Murphy, 2019).
• Library Publishing Coalition (LPC): Reports the most common publishing practices in academic and research libraries.  It includes the number of publications produced, types of publications produced, services offered to authors, and future plans for those services.
• JPPS (Journal Publishing Practices & Standards): Helps researches conduct journal quality assessment with a rating level system with explanations as to why each journal receives that.  The rating level system makes it simpler for users to understand why each journal receives a rating (Murphy, 2019).

There are also resources that provide publishing assistance, but either you or Tiffin University must have purchased a subscription.  Pfeiffer library is currently subscribed to these databases, so you can access them through our A-Z database list.  You may need your university ID credentials to access these sources.

• EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval): EDGAR provides sources that are already indexed, validated, and accepted by publishing companies that are required to comply with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
• Journal Citation Reports (JCR): Journal Citation Reports provides statistics to determine the importance of journals within their disciplines.