Open Scholarship Café: Predatory publishing – How to identify questionable journals

This is a hybrid event! We would like to meet you in person in the Hardiman Building, G010 (on ground floor) where we will finish with a free slice of fresh vegetarian pizza! But if you can’t join us on campus you are very welcome to join us online for the presentation and discussion. Please choose below if you join us in person or online. We need to know for catering purposes!

Publish or Perish! This is the world many researchers find themselves in. Questionable and sometimes fraudulent actors try to take advantage of the pressure on authors by offering to publish their research for a fee, but without the proper checks and processes expected from academic journals. These outlets are labelled predatory journals, and they seem to multiply in number year on year! They are seen by many as a genuine threat to the Open Access movement because they weaken the credibility of genuine OA journals.

The aim of this Open Scholarship Café is to look at the phenonomen of predatory publishing in a critical way. Is this real threat to academics or are we in a stage of “moral panic”? We will look at how to detect signs of predatory behaviour and how you can check if a journal adheres to academic standards. One of the tools we will look at is the Think Check Submit website.

The Café also aims to draw on the knowledge and experiences of the participants with regards to publishing. To draw on real world examples please forward emails of potentially predatory journals to Hardy (hardy.schwamm@universityofgalway.ie) in advance of the Café so we can look at them jointly.

The facilitator:

Hardy Schwamm is the Open Scholarship Librarian at University of Galway Library. Hardy is a member of the IReL Steering Group that negotioates Open Access agreements with publishers. Hardy is also interested in how the scholarly communications landscape is going to develop given the technological and policy changes of the last few years. This is the first time he is organising a sessin looking at the phenomenon of predatory publishing and he hopes participants will share experiences with him.