frontiers in oncology predatoryfrontiers in oncology predatory

10 Point checklist to identify predatory publishers. Certainly, the number of special issues published or scheduled in 1 year reveals no quality-related information, although the fact that the number of special issues in JCR-indexed MDPI-journals is so much higher than the number of ordinary issues per year coupled with their constant increase since 2018 inevitably awakens suspicions of a lucrative business aim. These lists very soon become outdated and incomplete, especially if the resources to keep them updated are scarce. It is interesting to note that the size of the Editorial Board was, in all cases, larger in the MDPI-journals than in the leading JCR-indexed journals belonging to the same categories (Table 2). Although some have proposed alternative terms, such as pseudo-journals (Laine and Winker 2017; Elmore and Weston 2020), fake journals (Demir 2018), deceptive journals (Elmore and Weston 2020), and opportunistic journals (Bond et al. However, as previously shown, some MDPI journals name are very similar to other publishers journals breaching the required condition of not been easily confused with another journal. (2020)and in Scopus (Hedding 2019; Cortegiani et al. Thus, universities, funding institutions, or any institution that evaluates scientific activity can disincentivize the submission of manuscripts to predatory journals and the acceptance of roles on their editorial committees, ignoring these milestones in the evaluation process of a curriculum vitae (Forero et al. Moreover, in January 2020, the number of special issues scheduled for 2020 with respect to those in 2019 skyrocketed in all the journals under study to levels as surprisingly high as 788 special issues in Sustainability, 830 in Applied Sciences, and 846 in Materials. It is difficult however to contextualize the analysis of APC in JCR-indexed MDPI journals for two reasons. Universities, professional associations, ). As depicted in Figure 5, the impact factors of all journals were reduced when self-citations were removed. 2019), data show analysed journals have a completely different pattern in this matter when compared with leading journals in the category. Lastly, predatory journals are a threat to scientists who may endanger their careers and devalue their curricula. Data on each selected journal were gathered from the following sections of the MDPI-journal web pages: Home, Editorial Board, Special Issues, APC, and Journal Statistics. Additionally, the constant and quite exceptional increase in the number of articles published in MDPI-journals between 2018 and 2019, reinforced by an exponential increase in the number of special issues, which easily outweigh the number of regular publications (above all in view of the previsions for 2020), together with an increase in APC fees could bring into question the status of MDPI as a publisher, at the very least because its APC-based business model alters the economic and scientific incentives in academic publishing (Siler 2020). In 2015, Frontiers Media was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall. Conflict of interest statement. Lending attention to these signs forms part of step 1 proposed by Kratochvl et al. Finally, the intense proliferation of predatory journals has given rise to predatory/fake conferences, equally pernicious for academia, and the subject of warnings from COPE (2019), as predatory journals and conferences are two sides of the same coin (Cortegiani et al. From a prescriptive viewpoint, Teixeira da Silva and Dobrnszki (2017) understood that the initial review could not reasonably last longer than 12months, to which another 12months have to be added for subsequent revision of the paper, amounting to as many as 8months, in the case of a process with three revisions. 2019). As mentioned above, MDPI reports state that the median time from submission to publication for all its 218 journals was 39days in 2019 (MDPI 2020) as it was in 2018 when MDPI published 203 journals (MDPI 2019). ghttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/engineering/journals/fast-publication-in-process-and-industrial-engineering. The author highlights the 'exponential growth' of predatory journals, stating that 'The alarming increase in the number of predatory journals (from 1,800 to 8,000 over the period 2010-4) and the exponential growth (from 53,000 to 420,000 between 2010 and 2014) of the articles that they publish (Shen and Bjork 2015) have rendered futile any effort 2019; Strong 2019), because they undermine its integrity (Vogel 2017; Abad-Garca 2019), its quality, and its credibility (Bond et al. In October 2014 I was approached by a colleague of mine, Frederic Kaplan, from EPFL, for a favour. (, Forero D. A., Oermann M. H., Manca A., Deriu F., Mendieta-Zern H., Dadkhah M., Bhad R., Deshpande S. N., Wang W., Cifuentes M. P. (, Grudniewicz A., Moher D., Cobey K. D., Bryson, G. L., Cukier, S., Allen, K., Arden, C., Balcom, L., Barros, T., Berger, M., Buitrago Ciro, J., Cugusi, L., Donaldson, M. R., Matthias, E., Graham, I. D., Hodgkinson, M., Khan, K. M., Mabizela, M., Manca, A., Milzow, K., Mouton, J., Muchenje, M., Olijhoek, T., Ommaya, A., Patwardhan, B., Poff, D., Proulx, L., Rodger, M., Severin, A., Strinzel, M., Sylos-Labini, M., Tamblyn, R., van Niekerk, M., Wicherts, J.M., Lalu, G. M. (, Kratochvl J., Plch L., Sebera M., Korikov E. (, Manca A., Cugusi L., Cortegiani A., Ingoglia G., Moher D., Deriu F. (, Manca A., Martinez G., Cugusi L., Dragone D., Dvir Z., Deiru F. (, Manca A., Moher D., Cugusi L., Dvir Z., Deriu F. (, Moher D., Shamseer L., Cobey K. D., Lalu, M. M., Galipeau, J., Avey, M. T., Ahmadzai, N., Alabousi M., Barbeau, P. Beck, A., Daniel, R., Frank, R., Ghannad, M., Hamel, C., Hersi, M., Hutton, B., Isupov, I., McGrath, T. A., McInnes, M. D. F., Page, M. J., Pratt, M., Pussegoda, K., Shea, B., Srivastava, A., Stevens, A., Thavorn, K., van Katwyk, S., Ward, R., Wolfe, D., Yazdi, F., Yu, A. M., Ziai, H. (, Oerman M. H., Nicoll L. H., Ashton K. S., Edie, A. H., Amarasekara, S., Chinn, P. L., Carter-Templeton, H., Ledbetter, L. S. (, Shamseer L., Moher D., Maduekwe O. Turner, L., Barbour, V., Burch, R., Clark, J., Galipeau, J., Roberts, J., Shea, B. J. However, some articles from some predatory journals are in fact indexed, both in PubMed (Manca et al. These steps are particularly urgent for databases that already include MDPI-journals (WOS, PubMed and Scopus), since the defining features of predatory journals are that they systematize for profit publication (COPE 2019) and prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship (Grudniewicz et al. Predatory Journals Are Infiltrating Citation Databases, Potential Predatory and Legitimate Biomedical Journals: Can You Tell the Difference? According to the MDPI Annual Report 2019 (MDPI 2020), these 218 journals are supported by 67,207 editors (an increase of 55.78% over 2018) with a median time from submission to publication of 39days (as it was in 2018) and APCs ranging from 300 to 2,000 CHF (1 Swiss Franc is approximately equal to 0.92 Euros) with a median of 1.525 CHF. The limitations of the available resources have meant that the analysis has been restricted to the behaviour of MDPI-journals in JCR over 2 years, 2018 and 2019, as well as the information available for 2020 in January 2020. Frontiers Media is a publisher of open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. Always check the website thoroughly 2. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, w. First, a proper systematic and structured overview of APC rates it is not available. before print) varies but is usually accomplished within 2 weeks (Broome 2017). Predatory journals, harmful to academia and science, . As with the number of published articles, the number of special issues for all journals between 2018 and 2019 increased, in such an exorbitant manner that the number of special issues in the MDPI-journals under analysis was easily higher, in the majority of cases, than the number of ordinary issues of 53 MDPI journals analysed since 98.11% of 53 analysed journals published 12 or fewer issues per year in 2018 (data from JCR 2019 edition). It should be pointed out that, despite the significant advance in the definition proposed by Grudniewicz et al. Journal impact factors of MDPI-journals with and without self-citations (2018). Data were collected between 2 December 2019 and 4 January 2020. BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. However, the Principles for Transparency and Best practices in Scholarly Publishing of COPE (2019) may well serve as a reference to evaluate journal behavior, particularly with reference to their disregard of quality assurance. (2019): predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices. WOSPredatory Reports328Frontiers19951SCIE4SSCI223MDPI 422 ! Check if the journal is a member of DOAJ, COPE, OASPA or STM 3. IMR Press All research efforts deserve support and recognition IMR Press is a publisher of open access peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences journals. It is beyond the scope of this research to answer that question based on the analysis conducted, further research is needed to address this key question. Moreover, the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series, and Publishers downgraded MDPI to 0 in 2019 and later upgraded it to 1 again. Comparable data from other publishing houses, which they rarely publish as aggregate figures, would be of interest, without which any comparison is impossible. 2017a, b)an alarmingly high number of them in the opinion of Manca et al. A contextual framework is therefore required to assess MDPI-journal self-citations. 2018) with all the consequences that may entail, not only at a scientific but at a social level. Both publishers, Hindawi and Frontiers, were founded by a husband-and-wife team. At the same time, if there is a lack of awareness of predatory journals among scientists, then they will evaluate those publications as if they were legitimate and may naively send papers to predatory journals. 2018). The librarian, Jeffrey Beall, while at the University of Colorado and now in retirement, coined the term to identify journals that, overlooking quality peer-review processes, seek to generate income exclusively through the APCs that the authors are expected to pay and who are then sent misleading information on citation indexes and spam-related marketing (Beall 2012; Laine and Winker 2017). Furthermore, no less importantly, the analysis showed that a large number of the citations that they receive are from other MDPI-journals. 2020). chttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/mathematics/journals/fast-publication. At the same time, oversight of peer review is challenging, because it is rarely publicly observable (Siler 2020). Grudniewicz et al. As Manca et al. are all necessary, although not sufficient conditions for proper identification of a predatory journal. Stay away from Frontiers. The revision times of the 53 journals under analysis were surprisingly similar, regardless of the high variability of the articles published in each journal in 2019 and were, in many cases, very much shorter than time spans that may be considered normal. No longer merely a medium for dissemination, scientific journals are now a key foundation for appointments and funding in scientific research (Shu et al. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. Peer review is a system of safeguards which, despite its limitations, fulfils its function reasonably well of ensuring that false research, of low quality, with serious flaws or inaccurate information is not disseminated, thereby avoiding misinformation (Elmore and Weston 2020; Siler 2020). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (, Improving universities activities in academic startup support through public interventions: The effectiveness of the German programme EXISTleverage of potentials, Changing conceptualization of innovation in the European Union and its impact on universities: Critical junctures and evolving institutional demands, Gender diversity and publication activityan analysis of STEM in the UK, Assessing the variety of collaborative practices in translational research: An analysis of scientists ego-networks, Early career academic's odyssey: A narrative study of her professional identity construction. Similar pernicious effects can be expected from citation stacking when journals cite each other to raise their impact factors (Heneberg 2016). Having completed the verification of the formal criteria, Kratochvl et al. The COPE/DOAJ/OASPA/WAME Principles for Transparency and Best Practices in Scholarly Publishing stipulate that journal names should not be easily confused with another journal and that journal websites should not guarantee very short peer-review times (as a member of COPE and DOAJ, MDPI could hardly argue that it ignores those Principles). In 2019, almost all 53 MDPI-journals under analysis had intra-MDPI citation rates well above 20% (all except Universe11.87% and Catalysts18.73%), reaching values as high as 56.94% in Electronics, 51.07% in the IJGI, 47.56% in Remote Sensing, and 46.55% in Sustainability (Table 3). Borrowing Martins (2016) terminology, self-citation and citation cartels are stratagems that may be applied to attempt to boost a Journal Impact Factor artificially. Predatory journals usually offer rapid peer-review processes, but without experts reviewing the quality of research and accuracy of the information (Oerman et al. Shedding further light on MDPI-journal citing sources, the top 10 MDPI journals for citations listed on the WOS were analysed and intra-MDPI citation levels were identified with other MDPI-journals. (, Shu F., Mongeon P., Haustein S., Siler K., Alperin J. P., Larivire V. (, Xia J., Harmon J. L., Connolly K. G., Donnelly R. M., Anderson M. R., Howard H. A. ihttps://www.elsevier.com/life-sciences/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/journals/fast-publication-in-agricultural-science. Despite the fact that impact-factor manipulation may result in criminal liability according to Fong et al. The high rate of self-citations of the journal Sustainability is coherent with data that the journal itself provided in its bibliometric review over the period 200918 (https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/5/1655), showing that Sustainability ranks first in citing journals (2,496 cites) very much over the Journal of Cleaner Production that occupies second position (658 cites) in this bibliographic review. Why Beall's blacklist of predatory journals died. Stop This Waste of People, Animals and Money, Analysis of Citation Patterns and Impact of Predatory Sources in the Nursing Literature, Ingreasing Awareness about Predatory Publishers, Journal of the American Psychiatric New Association, Readers Beware! It is important that academia and scholars become aware both of the risks of falling into the networks of predatory journals and, in addition, academics should be capable of properly identifying these journals, without presupposing that their inclusion in a prestigious database is a sort of quality hallmark that guarantees the integrity of their authorship, and both their peer-review and their editing processes (Severin and Low 2019; Cortegiani et al. Review is challenging, because it is rarely publicly observable ( Siler 2020 ) and in Scopus ( Hedding ;... Sufficient conditions for proper identification of a predatory journal pointed out that, despite the advance. 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