Search

The demanding promotion of university professors is being taken advantage of by international publishers to develop a fast business, that is framed in supposedly fraudulent activities of apparently scientific magazines, but without impact indexes that some experts already qualify as "epidemic" (García-Puente, 2019) and "plague" (Silva, 2016). This research uses the mystery client technique (Morena, 2013) to respond to an intentional sample of call for papers (CFP) submitted to researchers between January and April 2020, with a previously published article, that was intentionally altered to appear to be a scientific paper, but which violates the guidelines of originality and rigor: the order of the paragraphs is altered and translated into English with DeepL, without subsequent monitoring. During the period, 98 PICs were received and 38 submissions were made. The results are eloquent: none has been rejected, and within an average of 6 days 17 publication acceptances are confirmed. In all cases, payment is requested in advance. The article allows us to identify the profile of the journals, their recruitment strategies, the use of claims of: indexing, ethical standards and peer review and the naming strategies to simulate international prestige. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]