I’m a science reporter at a newspaper in Canada. I have approached some of these publishers with an entirely fake paper to see whether they would accept it. Most did. The problem is that they pretend to be ethical. So typically their websites do list an editorial board, an ethics policy and peer review policy and the rest — but none of it is true. All they want is money. In my case their “peer review” accepted a paper that was half geology and half medicine, in alternating pieces, and all of them plagiarized. It made no sense but it passed. And when I wrote back to say by the way it’s plagiarized, that was OK with them. They just wanted money.
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