There would be few of us who have not received an email praising our contributions to our chosen medical specialty and with an invitation to either submit a manuscript or to join the editorial board for a new open access on line journal. If you are an academic, expect to receive several of these emails on a daily basis.  This is the world of predatory publishing.

For those in academic practice or for those who are building their academic credentials to help appointment to a particular position or promotion, there is a pressure to publish.  With this publish or perish environment, it creates a need for publications and often they are needed yesterday.  Predatory publishers on very much on to this and know that naïve, time poor, vulnerable academics are perfect fodder to make a dollar.  It’s a big business, and if it were not for the fact that money is being made, we would not see this exponential growth in the numbers of predatory publishers.

Not surprisingly, the amount of spam email landing in our inboxes is increasing exponentially.  Don’t think that applying spam filters are going to make any difference.  The emails are constructed in such a way that it is difficult for email filters to differentiate between genuine and bogus emails and naturally we do not wish to miss out on the legitimate journal emails.   One particularly active predatory publishing house even goes to great lengths by regularly changing the domain name to avoid having their emails falling into your spam folders.

So how do we determine if an email approach is from a legitimate journal or not?  Until recently, it was easy.  All one had to do was to log onto Scholarly Open Access to look up the Beall’s List for Predatory Journals.  This important and useful resource was suddenly taken off line in January this year.  The normally outspoken Beall has gone to ground and has not provided explanation on the reasons for taking down his blog.  It was already known that he had received litigation threats, in particular from OMICS and undoubtedly he had few friends amongst the big business of predatory publishing. The closure of his blog must have been the dreams of predatory publishers come true.

What do we do now?  How are we to know which journals are legitimate or not?  In my opinion, creating a copy site for the Beall List is not the way forward. It would be a difficult, time-consuming task. It would becoming increasingly difficult to maintain with the exponential growth of predatory publishers. It would be worse than trying to keep ahead of increasing antibiotic resistance in bacteria.  There is also going to be a risk associated with being unpopular with big business enterprises that are not known for ethical or moral behavior.

The best way forward is to create a list of the good journals.  These should be specialty specific.  The exclusion of journals on the list does not mean that they are unsafe or form a predatory publishing house.  It simply means that a red flag has been raised and that close scrutiny be undertaken.  This would entail both detailed on-line research, consulting trusted colleagues as well as considering writing to the editor in chief or editorial board members for their insights (don’t contact them through the journal; any bona fide academic can be found through their institution).

For my own specialty, the Urology Green List has been created.  This is to create a resource where those who wish to publish in a urological journal can source the titles of legitimate journals.  There are a number of factors that contribute to a journal’s inclusion onto the list and as examples, this may include affiliation with a professional society, publication by a publishing house that has a track record of publishing for other reputable journals, a transparent peer review process, adoption of COPE principles, transparency of any article processing charges, an engaged, indexing and a reputable editorial board.  This is only to name a number of factors and of course there should be other considerations.  Clearer criteria will evolve over time.

I would call upon all medical specialties to create their own Green List.  There is nothing like experts knowing which journals in their field are safe and legitimate. Maintaining such a list would be infinitely easier to maintain once established compared to attempts to keep up with the journals considered to be unsafe and predatory.  The time is now to create a Green List movement.

Henry Woo is a professor of surgery, Sydney Adventist Hospital Clinical School, University of Sydney, Australia. He blogs at Surgical Opinion and can be reached on Twitter @DrHWoo.

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