When you’re a librarian working with open access publishing, there is a question that comes up a lot. It’s one that many of us dread, because it tends to come with a lot of baggage, and it can be tricky to answer in a way that satisfies the querent. The question is, “What about predatory open access publishers?” Sometimes it’s asked as an attempt to discredit OA publishing as a whole, in which case it’s likely that no amount of logical argumentation and no set of facts will be acceptable as a response. More often, though, it’s asked in the context of problem-solving. Predatory OA is a threat – to vulnerable junior scholars, to authors in developing countries, to the enterprise of scholarly publishing as a whole – so what should we do about it? It’s tempting to toss off a quick, “Don’t give them your work to publish. Problem solved!” It has the advantage of brevity, but it doesn’t do much to address the very real fears of scholars who don’t have the training and the experience to confidently evaluate the worth of a given publication. To give me something to point people to when the question comes up, and to provide a useful alternative to lists of predatory publishers (more on this in a minute), I decided to share my own understanding of what constitutes a ‘predatory’ publisher and offer a set of criteria by which authors can evaluate publications. It doesn’t provide any easy answers, but hopefully it provides some useful guidance.
Why can’t I just look at a list?
Before we get to the good stuff, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the many lists in this space. ‘Tis the season, so we’re going to call them “nice” lists and “naughty” lists.
