Strategic Publishing : Predatory Publishing

A predatory publisher, is a publishing venture that takes advantage of the academic need to publish with little or no return.

Their characteristics are:

• Making money is their main goal
• The quality of work is not considered. Peer-review process is unclear
• Make false claims about impact factors and indexing
• Unethical business practices
• Hard to track down information about them such as editing boards and ethics

Predatory publishers take advantage of the Gold Open Access model, where they make a profit through their Article Processing Charges (APCs).

It should be noted that Open Access does not make a publisher predatory. Anywhere you choose to publish should be done with careful consideration, and should be discussed.