Corrupt and questionable practices in the scholarly publishing industry
Jeffrey Beall · 2014
This article reports on two areas of corruption in the scholarly open-access publishing industry. One is misleading metrics, which is the creation of companies that supply fake or counterfeit impact factors to questionable online journals. The journals then use these metrics to solicit manuscript submissions that they then charge authors to publish. The second area of corruption is journal hijackings. This refers to someone creating a counterfeit website for an established journal and then soliciting articles for the journal. They then accept all submissions and charge authors. The authors mistakenly believe they have published in a legitimate journal and are victimized by the journal hijackers.