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Dhaka, 01 November, 2018 - Today, icddr,b’s Library and Information Services Section organised a discussion with 26 faculty members and librarians from different eminent public, private and international universities of the country to raise awareness on how to avoid publishing research articles in predatory journals and why it matters.Â
In an editorial for the British Medical Journal in 2015, icddr,b’s Chair of the Board of Trustees Dr Richard Smith and Executive Editor Jocalyn Clark reported that predatory journals (a term first coined by librarian Jeffrey Beall) are fake or scam journals offering “open access” publication in exchange for payment, without providing robust editorial or publishing services. They have been discredited by the scientific community, and because they are not indexed in standard databases any research published in them is effectively lost. Their main victims are institutions and researchers in low and middle income countries. Researchers and scientists are easy targets because their promotion often depends on the number of articles they have published, but sadly, publishing in a predatory journal will not count towards promotion and could end up damaging their reputation.
However, it is important to distinguish between open access publishing and predatory publishing – the two are very different although publications nature is same.
Recently an investigation by the Guardian in collaboration with German publishers NDR, WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin found that more than 175,000 scientific articles have been published by five of the largest “predatory open-access publishers”.
In the discussion, Dr M Nazim Uddin, Senior Manager and Head of icddr,b Library demonstrated how to identify journals that are legitimate and credible. This includes but is not limited to specificity, review and citation, impact factor, whether the publisher is a member of recognised professional organisations that commit to best practices in publishing, whether it is indexed, and finally whether it is following standard editorial and peer review processes and has transparent governance and ownership. They said that authors, i.e. researchers and scientists, should also be sceptical of unknown journals.
Speaking on the occasion, Catherine Spencer, Director of Communications and Change Management at icddr,b said, “Scientific committees, academia, practitioners and media, who are the primary users of publications simply do not know if the work or studies, published in a predatory journal are good, worthless or even bad. This is because they cannot be sure of the robustness of the editorial process or peer review that the articles have been subjected to and thus do not know whether the information is reliable. This trend has also extended into predatory conferences, with a wide variety of conference invitations being sent through email every day, luring the unsuspecting to substandard events.”
Some predatory journals and their publications were presented and discussed in the dialogue. It is hoped that participants will take back the lessons learned and will sensitise their colleagues at respective institutions and actively take part in disseminating the importance of publishing research articles in legitimate and credible journals.
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TIK