Abstract

In recent years, academic publishing has been faced with many destructive phenomena. “Predatory publishers” (or journals) are one challenge for scholarly publishing. This term was introduced to academic societies for the first time by Jeffrey Beall in 2010 (1). A predatory journal is a journal which publishes papers without peer review, or by an unfair review process and charging publication fees (2). According to Beall’s definition, questionable peer review process and unknown location of the real controlling entity are among the most important criteria for detecting predatory journals (3). In 2016, Beall announced that the number of predatory publisher was growing (4) from 18 in 2011 to 923 in 2016 (figure 1). These statistics convince researchers of the need for more research into dealing with predatory journals.

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