Scholarly Publishing

The rise of scholarly, open access publishing has lead to researchers being inundated with requests from predatory publishers . While scholarly, open access, online journals provide an alternative to traditional journals, you need to check whether they are reviewed and make a judgment of their quality.

Predatory publishers take advantage of the Gold Open Access (OA) publishing model, where an author pays to have an article openly available on the web. Their websites mimic legitimate journal or publisher websites.

The increasing prevalence of "predatory" publishers can be scary but with a little common sense and an understanding of ethical and valid publishing practices you will be able to easily avoid them.

Some resources to help you avoid predatory publishers:

• How to Spot a Predatory Publisher by Cambridge University Library

• The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) has published the 3rd edition of Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing . It provides 16 points of what they look for when assessing the quality of a publication.

• Beall's List : a list of questionable, scholarly, open access publishers.

• Ulrichsweb : search for a journal, and look for 'refereed' in the description which means the journal has been peer-reviewed.

Predatory conferences (conferences promoted to fraudulently make money from attendance fees) are becoming an increasingly common part of academic life. When you receive emails to invite you to attend conferences, how do you know which one is legitimate, and which one is a spam invitation to collect registration fees for one that doesn’t exist?
Think. Check. Attend is a useful tool that can help determine the legitimacy and academics credentials of conferences.