And for the struggling academic, who really *needs* a quality publication, how hard is it to fool yourself into believing that your big break has arrived?
Well yes, that is how I interpret the business model: predatory journals leech money off the people who aren’t able to get into real journals, fooling them into thinking that this will help their career. I have seen several CVs like that. But they wouldn’t fool me, because I know the journals in my field, and because the names of the predatory ones usually give them away (American Journal of Botany = serious, American Research Journal of Botany = alarm bells). A bit of googling does the rest.
Surely it isn’t too much to ask to be careful about where one submits a paper, and to be careful when examining somebody’s CV? Isn’t that what doing one’s job properly means?