Skip to Main Content
Winona State University
Locations ⌵
Winona Campus Rochester Campus
Book a Room Ask the Library My Account
Krueger Library
Search ⌵
Search Overview Research Guides & Tutorials WorldCat: WSU & Beyond Databases A-Z Course Reserves Periodicals by Title Open River: Digital Collections Archives & Special Collections
Services ⌵
Services Overview Borrow & Request Research Help Faculty Services Tutoring Services Digital Learning Commons
Collections ⌵
Collections Overview Databases A-Z Archives & Special Collections Virtual Displays Open River: Digital Collections Library Art Government Documents
About Us ⌵
About Us Overview Mission & Goals Contact Us Subject Librarian Liaisons Policies Library FAQs

Open Access (OA)

This guide is a location for information on the topic of Open Access. Like the course material affordability/OER guide, it covers the singular topic but can cover an entire information cycle (e.g. what is it, publishing tips, finding OA journals, models,

Predatory Publishers

Scholarly publishing is already complicated, but predatory publishers take things to another level. The resources here are meant to help you evaluate publishers and journals before submitting!

According to Think, Check, Submit (TCS), a collaborative initiative developed across the ALPSP, AUP, COPE, DOAJ, ISSN, LIBER, OAPEN, OASPA, STM, and UKSG:

Predatory publishers or journals are those which charge authors a fee for publication with no intention of providing the expected services – such as editorial or peer review – in return. Charging a fee is a legitimate business model, but the publisher should be providing a good publishing service in return.  Authors, realising that they have submitted their paper to a questionable publisher, can find they are charged a large fee if they want to withdraw their article.

Trust your gut, ask questions, and investigate. Want to sit down with a librarian to work through a checklist or talk through the process of evaluating journals? Reach out to us.

Things to Watch Out For

A predatory journal/publisher may display one or more of these characteristics:

  • A journal title which can be easily confused with another journal or that might mislead potential authors and readers about the journal’s origin, scope or association with other journals

  • Very wide scope

  • Displays of unofficial impact factors

  • False claims of being indexed in major services like PubMed or DOAJ

  • No publisher address or contact information

  • Unclear ownership of the journal

  • Spams researchers with many emails inviting submissions, often unrelated to expertise

  • Advertises very fast times from submission to publication

  • Publishes out-of-scope articles

  • Publishes nonsense articles

  • Poor or non-existent editing of articles (many spelling mistakes or very poor grammar)

  • Hides information on charges

  • No editorial board is listed, or the editorial board comprises dead or retired scholars or scholars who are not specialised in the topic

  • Lack of information on the policies of the journal, such as peer review, licensing and copyright

--

List pulled from Think, Check, Submit, "About Predatory Publishing" licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.