Every once in a while, the people on my editing listservs become animated about something important. This time, I am glad to participate in their awareness-raising efforts.
The topic is predatory journals. It used to be (e.g., in the 1960s and 1970s) that there were fewer than, perhaps 5,000 reputable journals in the sciences and humanities. You could browse the contents by reading the spines of most of them during an afternoon’s stroll through a major university library.
Now there are literally thousands of journals out there, ready to publish your results. For a fee. And many of them are not very good. This article (link below), by Ray Hunziker, published by the American Medical Writers Association, explains Open Access and what predatory publishing is, and how to determine whether or not a journal publisher is legitimate.