Shen Cenyu, Björk Bo-Christer
Information Systems Science, Hanken School of Economics, PO Box 479, Arkadiankatu 22, Helsinki, 00101, Finland.
BMC Med. 2015 Oct 1;13:230. doi: 10.1186/s12916-015-0469-2.
A negative consequence of the rapid growth of scholarly open access publishing funded by article processing charges is the emergence of publishers and journals with highly questionable marketing and peer review practices. These so-called predatory publishers are causing unfounded negative publicity for open access publishing in general. Reports about this branch of e-business have so far mainly concentrated on exposing lacking peer review and scandals involving publishers and journals. There is a lack of comprehensive studies about several aspects of this phenomenon, including extent and regional distribution.
After an initial scan of all predatory publishers and journals included in the so-called Beall's list, a sample of 613 journals was constructed using a stratified sampling method from the total of over 11,000 journals identified. Information about the subject field, country of publisher, article processing charge and article volumes published between 2010 and 2014 were manually collected from the journal websites. For a subset of journals, individual articles were sampled in order to study the country affiliation of authors and the publication delays.
Over the studied period, predatory journals have rapidly increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 active journals. Early on, publishers with more than 100 journals dominated the market, but since 2012 publishers in the 10-99 journal size category have captured the largest market share. The regional distribution of both the publisher's country and authorship is highly skewed, in particular Asia and Africa contributed three quarters of authors. Authors paid an average article processing charge of 178 USD per article for articles typically published within 2 to 3 months of submission.
Despite a total number of journals and publishing volumes comparable to respectable (indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals) open access journals, the problem of predatory open access seems highly contained to just a few countries, where the academic evaluation practices strongly favor international publication, but without further quality checks.
由论文处理费资助的学术开放获取出版的快速增长带来了一个负面后果，即出现了营销和同行评审做法备受质疑的出版商和期刊。这些所谓的掠夺性出版商正在给开放获取出版整体带来无端的负面宣传。迄今为止，关于这个电子商务分支的报道主要集中在揭露同行评审缺失以及涉及出版商和期刊的丑闻。对于这一现象的几个方面，包括其规模和地区分布，缺乏全面的研究。
在初步浏览所谓的“贝亚尔列表”中包含的所有掠夺性出版商和期刊之后，从总共11000多种已识别的期刊中使用分层抽样方法构建了一个包含613种期刊的样本。从期刊网站上手动收集了有关学科领域、出版商所在国家、论文处理费以及2010年至2014年期间发表的文章数量的信息。对于一部分期刊，抽取了个别文章以研究作者的所属国家和出版延迟情况。
在研究期间，掠夺性期刊的出版量迅速增加，从2010年的53000篇增至2014年估计的420000篇文章，由大约8000种活跃期刊出版。早期，拥有100多种期刊的出版商主导市场，但自2012年以来，期刊数量在10 - 99种的出版商占据了最大的市场份额。出版商所在国家和作者的地区分布极不均衡，特别是亚洲和非洲的作者占了四分之三。作者为每篇文章支付的平均论文处理费为178美元，文章通常在提交后的2至3个月内发表。
尽管掠夺性开放获取期刊的总数和出版量与声誉良好的（由开放获取期刊目录索引）开放获取期刊相当，但掠夺性开放获取问题似乎高度集中在少数几个国家，在这些国家学术评估做法强烈倾向于国际出版，但却没有进一步的质量检查。
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