Predatory journals have several tell-tale signs that researchers should look for.

The increasing number of predatory journals spotted in the UGC list of approved journals is a clear indication that UGC is not equipped to produce and sustain a journal white list. And allowing universities to recommend journals to be added to the list has only made things worse. It’s time it scraps the list and adopts the DOAJ list instead.

The University Grants Commission’s (UGC) approved list of journals or white list appears more grey than white. In June this year, the UGC released a revised list of 33,112 approved journals in which university/college faculty and students may publish papers. It has now come to light that UGC’s revised list contains 111 potential or possible predatory or fraudulent journals.  Last week, I reported that the revised list contains 84 predatory journals that are found in librarian Jeffrey Beall’s (University of Colorado, Denver) list of “potential, possible, or probable” predatory journals, bringing the total to 195.

Of the 586 journals that the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) had recently removed from its directory on grounds of “suspected editorial misconduct by publisher”, the UGC list contains 114. Three of the 114 journals have an overlap with Beall’s list.

By all accounts, the probability of the revised list containing more predatory journals cannot be ruled out. For instance, the UGC list has included a few journals which have all the tell-tale signs of predatory journal. They are neither found in Beall’s list nor are they among the DOAJ’s rejected journals.

The journals from the UGC white list (45,925, including inactive journals at ugc.ac.in) were “web-scraped” and individually “string-matched” with the list of journals in the DOAJ list flagged as “suspected editorial misconduct by publisher”. Earlier, the same list was compared with Jeffrey Beall’s list. An exact string match between the names of journals in the lists was taken as the criteria to flag the journal as predatory. The full list is maintained here.

“[Compiling the list] is not an easy task. The definition of predatory journals is different from one person to another. We are aware of predatory journals and will remove them from the list if we are provided with details,” Dr. V.S. Chauhan, who is the Head of the UGC committee that prepared the list had told me earlier.

Clear indicators

A few of the predatory journals that have been removed from the DOAJ database want the authors to assign copyrights to the journals, which goes against the grain of open access, while a few others offer an E-certificate to authors of published papers and a hard copy of the certificate for a fee. One journal has an open invitation to researchers to “propose a journal”. It also offers authors a unique payment option — by paying a registration fee of Rs.3,000, authors will be allowed to publish multiple articles without paying any article processing charge (APC), it says. While one journal on engineering and technology accepts papers in 30 engineering disciplines, another journal accepts papers from almost all engineering and science disciplines. And one journal carries agriculture and cancer-related articles in the same issue of the journal. Most journals have fake impact factors to impress naive researchers the importance of the journal; the Index Copernicus Value is cited as impact factor.

Sting operation

In a sting operation in late 2012 by John Bohannon of Science, a “mundane paper with grave errors” was sent to 167 journals included in DOAJ database and 121 from Beall’s list. While 82% publishers in Dr. Beall’s list accepted the questionable paper, nearly 45% of DOAJ publishers did not reject the paper.

About six months after the results of the sting operation were published in October 2013 in the journal Science, the DOAJ began its mammoth exercise of weeding out the bad apples. The DOAJ has cleaned up its database by removing nearly 3,800 journals.

Following the introduction of new criteria for listing in March 2014, DOAJ has received 1,600 applications from Open Access journal publishers in India, which is the “highest number” in the world. But of the 1,600, only 4% (74) were from genuine journal publishers and accepted for inclusion in the DOAJ directory, while 78% were rejected for various reasons. One of the main reasons for rejection is the predatory or dubious nature of the journals.

The journals removed from the DOAJ list due to “Suspected Editorial Misconduct by Publishers” that match with the UGC list

Journals that match with Beall’s list:

Published in The Hindu on September 14, 2017