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Competing Interests: The BMJ publishes all research with open access. Authors pay an article processing charge, which can be waived for unfunded research. Some BMJ specialist journals also publish research with open access, but most are “hybrid” journals, which means that research is behind access controls unless an article processing charge is paid. Competing interests (MK, DSS): We have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and declare the following interests: MK has no conflict of interests to declare, DSS has received educational research grants from Dr Schär (a gluten-free food manufacturer) and Tillotts Pharma (producer of a point of care test for coeliac disease) for investigator led studies. Competing interests (JJA, MB): We have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and declare the following interests: both authors have previously written editorial pieces, none of which have been published in open access publications. MB is an associate editor of Clinical Nutrition, an Elsevier group hybrid journal, and editor in chief of Frontline Gastroenterology, a BMJ hybrid journal.

The aim of this study was to assess the knowledge and influence of predatory journals in the field of dermatology in Austria. A total of 286 physicians (50.5% men) completed a questionnaire. The vast majority of subjects read scientific articles (n = 281, 98.3%) and took them into consideration in their clinical decision-making (n = 271, 98.5% of participants that regularly read scientific literature). Open access was known by 161 (56.3%), predatory journals by 84 (29.4%), and the Beall's list by 19 physicians (6.7%). A total of 117 participants (40.9%) had been challenged by patients with results from the scientific literature, including 9 predatory papers. Participants who knew of predatory journals had a higher level of education as well as scientific experience, and were more familiar with the open-access system (p < 0.001). These results indicate that the majority of dermatologists are not familiar with predatory journals. This is particularly the case for physicians in training and in the early stages of their career.

Predatory publishing is an exploitative fraudulent open-access publishing model that applies charges under the pretense of legitimate publishing operations without actually providing the editorial services associated with legitimate journals. The aim of this study was to analyze this phenomenon in the field of anesthesiology and related specialties (intensive care, critical and respiratory medicine, pain medicine, and emergency care). Two authors independently surveyed a freely accessible, constantly updated version of the original Beall lists of potential, possible, or probable predatory publishers and standalone journals. We identified 212 journals from 83 publishers, and the total number of published articles was 12,871. The reported location of most publishers was in the United States. In 43% of cases (37/84), the reported location was judged as "unreliable" after being checked using the 3-dimensional view in Google Maps. Six journals were indexed in PubMed. Although 6 journals were declared to be indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, none were actually registered. The median article processing charge was 634.5 US dollars (interquartile range, 275-1005 US dollars). Several journals reported false indexing/registration in the Committee on Publication Ethics and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors registries and Google Scholar. Only 32% (67/212) reported the name of the editor-in-chief. Rules for ethics/scientific misconduct were reported in only 24% of cases (50/212). In conclusion, potential or probable predatory open-access publishers and journals are widely present in the broad field of anesthesiology and related specialties. Researchers should carefully check journals' reported information, including location, editorial board, indexing, and rules for ethics when submitting their manuscripts to open-access journals.

Objectives: As open-access journals have become increasingly common, it has provided more options for researchers to publish their work and improved access of information to the public. However, some open-access journals charge the authors processing fee on submission. In certain cases, this can be rather expensive. This study is the first study to specifically assess the cost of publishing in exclusively open-access, peer-reviewed surgical journals, and their correlation with journal impact, in the form of 6 bibliometrics., Design and Setting: This is a cross-sectional study. A list of journals is compiled using the SCImago Journal & Country Rank and Directory of Open Access Journals. 6 indices are measured - impact factor, SCOPUS h-index, SCImago journal rank indicator (SJR), Eigenfactor, Article Influence Score and Google h5 index. The cost of publication (in USD$) of a research article (maximum of 6 pages) is used as a baseline., Results: 89 research journals are included. The median cost of publication is USD$100 (range [0-2580]). 47% are free of charge. 13% can cost more than USD$2000 per article. SJR and Google h5 index appear to be the only indices that correlate linearly with the cost (p = 0.015 and 0.041, respectively), although the correlations are weak. 3 indices, namely impact factor, SJR and Article Influence Score appear to have very strong correlations with each other (Pearson coefficient > 0.90)., Conclusions: From this study, the cost of publishing in open-access journals bears little correlation to their impact; this poses a dilemma for researchers without significant funding. Therefore, authors and funders must consider cautiously when submitting to these journals., (Crown Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: There is no standardized definition of what a predatory journal is, nor have the characteristics of these journals been delineated or agreed upon. In order to study the phenomenon precisely a definition of predatory journals is needed. The objective of this scoping review is to summarize the literature on predatory journals, describe its epidemiological characteristics, and to extract empirical descriptions of potential characteristics of predatory journals. Methods: We searched five bibliographic databases: Ovid MEDLINE, Embase Classic + Embase, ERIC, and PsycINFO, and Web of Science on January 2 nd , 2018. A related grey literature search was conducted March 27 th , 2018. Eligible studies were those published in English after 2012 that discuss predatory journals. Titles and abstracts of records obtained were screened. We extracted epidemiological characteristics from all search records discussing predatory journals. Subsequently, we extracted statements from the empirical studies describing empirically derived characteristics of predatory journals. These characteristics were then categorized and thematically grouped.   Results: 920 records were obtained from the search. 344 of these records met our inclusion criteria. The majority of these records took the form of commentaries, viewpoints, letters, or editorials (78.44%), and just 38 records were empirical studies that reported empirically derived characteristics of predatory journals. We extracted 109 unique characteristics from these 38 studies, which we subsequently thematically grouped into six categories: journal operations, article, editorial and peer review, communication, article processing charges, and dissemination, indexing and archiving, and five descriptors.    Conclusions: This work identified a corpus of potential characteristics of predatory journals. Limitations of the work include our restriction to English language articles, and the fact that the methodological quality of articles included in our extraction was not assessed. These results will be provided to attendees at a stakeholder meeting seeking to develop a standardized definition for what constitutes a predatory journal., Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed.

Background: There is no standardized definition of what a predatory journal is, nor have the characteristics of these journals been delineated or agreed upon. In order to study the phenomenon precisely a definition of predatory journals is needed. The objective of this scoping review is to summarize the literature on predatory journals, describe its epidemiological characteristics, and to extract empirical descriptions of potential characteristics of predatory journals. Methods: We searched five bibliographic databases: Ovid MEDLINE, Embase Classic + Embase, ERIC, and PsycINFO, and Web of Science on January 2 nd , 2018. A related grey literature search was conducted March 27 th , 2018. Eligible studies were those published in English after 2012 that discuss predatory journals. Titles and abstracts of records obtained were screened. We extracted epidemiological characteristics from all search records discussing predatory journals. Subsequently, we extracted statements from the empirical studies describing empirically derived characteristics of predatory journals. These characteristics were then categorized and thematically grouped.   Results: 920 records were obtained from the search. 344 of these records met our inclusion criteria. The majority of these records took the form of commentaries, viewpoints, letters, or editorials (78.44%), and just 38 records were empirical studies that reported empirically derived characteristics of predatory journals. We extracted 109 unique characteristics from these 38 studies, which we subsequently thematically grouped into six categories: journal operations, article, editorial and peer review, communication, article processing charges, and dissemination, indexing and archiving, and five descriptors.    Conclusions: This work identified a corpus of potential characteristics of predatory journals. Limitations of the work include our restriction to English language articles, and the fact that the methodological quality of articles included in our extraction was not assessed. These results will be provided to attendees at a stakeholder meeting seeking to develop a standardized definition for what constitutes a predatory journal., Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed.

Scientific journals have virtually disappeared as subscription-based familiar paper copies. These have been replaced by article by article access on internet sites (either subscription based paid for by libraries in multi-journal often million dollar 'Big Deal' packages or by author prepayments of thousand dollars 'article processing fees' (Omary and Lawrence, Dealing with rising publication costs. The Scientist 2017;31:29-31), followed by open access. The result appears to be the death of the traditional scientific journal as a familiar means of communication, after nearly 350 years from the time of Anton van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke (for two early microbiology examples). Rather than journals with page numbers, individual reports are accessed using titles or manuscript file code numbers. This commentary is knowingly provocative, describing the rapidly changing situation in scientific publication at the beginning of the 21st century and predicting a bad future, basically the end of the long-time most-used vehicles for scientific communication, the paper scientific journal with volumes and pages. This view is not particular to this author and appears frequently today (e.g. The Scientist 2012; https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/10/26/revisiting-why-hasnt-scientific-publishing-been-disrupted-already/). This negative conclusion offers no better possibilities, as it is concluded that it is already too late and too far along this pathway for any meaningful middle ground. This commentary is intended for a broad group of potential readers, including authors and readers of this journal (who are active microbial scientists who need to adapt to individual manuscript identification numbers replacing page numbers), as well as the larger community interested broadly in scientific communication, and even our institutional librarians (who have experienced the disappearance of paper copies from their shelves, and especially unsustainable rapid increases in money costs at a time of very limited resources).

The financial pressure that publishers impose on libraries is a worldwide concern. Gold open-access publishing with an expensive article-processing charge paid by the authors is often presented as an ideal solution to this problem. However, such a system threatens less-funded departments and even article quality., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Open access publishing enables scholarship to be openly accessible to everyone, which has countless benefits. However, the open access movement has opened the door for "predatory publishers" to take advantage of researchers surviving in this publish or perish academic landscape. Predatory journals are becoming increasingly common. Nursing researchers, instructors, and students need to be made aware of the dangers of predatory journals, and they need to know how to identify them. While there are blacklists and whitelists that can be used to aid in decision-making, it is critical to note that these lists can never be entirely up to date. This article incorporates a literature review which provides insights into newer trends in predatory and unethical publishing, including "journal hijacking" and "bogus impact factors". Extensive criteria for assessing emerging or unknown journals is compiled to aid researchers, students, educators, and the public in evaluating open access publications.

So-called predatory publishing is a new and rising phenomenon presenting as an intellectual fraud that jeopardises the quality of scientific contribution, compromises the activity of authors, reviewers and editors of legitimate journals, damages the image of open access publications and is a very profitable business. In this paper, we review the concept and relevance of predatory journals and the characteristics that differentiate them from legitimate publications. Neurosurgical and general neuroscience journals are not immune to this problem. Academic institutions and ethics committees have a duty to raise awareness of this phenomenon and provide information and support to authors and the whole scientific community to avoid its propagation and potential control of biomedical publishing., (Copyright © 2017 Sociedad Española de Neurocirugía. Publicado por Elsevier España, S.L.U. All rights reserved.)

Predatory magazines are created by unreliable publishers who, after collecting a fee, publish the submitted paper in the Open Access (OA) formula without providing substantive control. For the purpose of "encouraging" authors to submit their work, they often impersonate existing periodicals by using a similar-sounding title, a similar webpage, and copied names of editors of the editorial board. They also offer credits close in name to the Impact Factor. The purpose of such activity is to deceive authors and to earn money in an unfair manner. This contribution presents mechanisms used by such journals and includes suggestions for protection from the duplicity and the subsequent disappointment of publishing, often for an exorbitant fee., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Introduction: Based on relative population size and burden of disease, emergency care publication outputs from low- and middle-income regions are disproportionately lower than those of high-income regions. Ironically, outputs from regions with higher publication rates are often less relevant in the African context. As a result, the dissemination of and access to local research is essential to local researchers, but the cost of this access (actual and cost-wise) remains unknown. The aim of this study was to describe access to African emergency care publications in terms of publisher-based access (open access or subscription) and alternate access (self-archived or author provided), as well as the cost of access., Methods: We conducted a retrospective, cross-sectional study using all emergency medicine publications included in Scopus between 2011 and 2015. A sequential search strategy described access to each article, and we calculated mean article charges against the purchasing power parity index (used to describe out-of-pocket expense)., Results: We included 666 publications from 49 journals, of which 395 (59.3%) were open access. For subscription-based articles, 106 (39.1%) were self-archived, 60 (22.1%) were author-provided, and 105 (38.8%) were inaccessible. Mean article access cost was $36.44, and mean processing charge was $2,319.34. Using the purchasing power parity index it was calculated that equivalent out-of-pocket expenditure for South African, Ghanaian and Tanzanian authors would respectively be $15.77, $10.44 and $13.04 for access, and $1,004.02, $664.36 and $830.27 for processing. Based on this, the corrected cost of a single-unit article access or process charge for South African, Ghanaian and Tanzanian authors, respectively, was 2.3, 3.5 and 2.8 times higher than the standard rate., Conclusion: One in six African emergency care publications are inaccessible outside institutional library subscriptions; additionally, the cost of access to publications in low- and middle-income countries appears prohibitive. Publishers should strongly consider revising pricing for more equitable access for researchers from low- and middle-income countries., Competing Interests: Conflicts of Interest: By the WestJEM article submission agreement, all authors are required to disclose all affiliations, funding sources and financial or management relationships that could be perceived as potential sources of bias. No author has professional or financial relationships with any companies that are relevant to this study. There are no conflicts of interest or sources of funding to declare.

Background: In 1982, the Annals of Virology published a paper showing how Liberia has a highly endemic potential of Ebola warning health authorities of the risk for potential outbreaks; this journal is only available by subscription. Limiting the accessibility of such knowledge may have reduced information propagation toward public health actors who were indeed surprised by and unprepared for the 2014 epidemic. Open access (OA) publication can allow for increased access to global health research (GHR). Our study aims to assess the use, cost and impact of OA diffusion in the context of GHR., Method: A total of 3366 research articles indexed under the Medical Heading Subject Heading "Global Health" published between 2010 and 2014 were retrieved using PubMed to (1) quantify the uptake of various types of OA, (2) estimate the article processing charges (APCs) of OA, and (3) analyse the relationship between different types of OA, their scholarly impact and gross national income per capita of citing countries., Results: Most GHR publications are not available directly on the journal's website (69%). Further, 60.8% of researchers do not self-archive their work even when it is free and in keeping with journal policy. The total amount paid for APCs was estimated at US$1.7 million for 627 papers, with authors paying on average US$2732 per publication; 94% of APCs were paid to journals owned by the ten most prominent publication houses from high-income countries. Researchers from low- and middle-income countries are generally citing less expensive types of OA, while researchers in high-income countries are citing the most expensive OA., Conclusions: Although OA may help in building global research capacity in GHR, the majority of publications remain subscription only. It is logical and cost-efficient for institutions and researchers to promote OA by self-archiving publications of restricted access, as it not only allows research to be cited by a broader audience, it also augments citation rates. Although OA does not ensure full knowledge transfer from research to practice, limiting public access can negatively impact implementation and outcomes of health policy and reduce public understanding of health issues.