Curbing academic predators: JoTT’s policy regarding citation of publications from predatory journals
Rajeev Raghavan, Neelesh Dahanukar, Sanjay Molur · Journal of Threatened Taxa · 2015
world's leading contributors to predatory journals (Xia et al. 2015), and the country houses the major share of the world's predatory publishers (Bohanon 2013;Xia et al. 2015).One way of fighting this issue is to make potential authors aware of the problem of predatory publications, and simultaneously setting a firm journal policy against publishing in predatory journals.In this editorial, we make the reader and prospective authors understand the general nature of the problem and set Journal of Threatened Taxa's policy regarding citation of work published in predatory journals.While a number of glaring examples, from all different fields of science, are now available to understand the effects of predatory publications, we wish to restrict our discussion on examples that fall within the aims and scope of the Journal of Threatened Taxa (JoTT).In particular, we provide examples from the field of aquatic sciences and from within India.India has a long and productive history of aquatic science related research, and scientists in the country have been credited with pioneering research outputs in the subject area (Silas 2003).However, of late, the quality of aquatic science research in the country has been affected by a spate of poor (see Smith-Vaniz & Carpenter 2015) and unethical publications (see Raghavan et al. 2013), including those that make use of predatory journals (see Raghavan et al. 2014).