[...] At any rate, the need for academics to get published, together with the low cost of “publishing” on-line, has brought a cornucopia of entrepreneurial “publishers” who make money by creating “journals” where authors pay to have their articles published. The payments are not described as costs of self-advertising, of course, but as costs of administrative expenses and the like. Librarian Jeffrey Beall lists publishers and journals that seem to be blatantly dishonest, for example in claiming to use peer review while not doing so, or by not even publishing actual journals, only citations (e.g. “The suspicious case of Science Record journals”; “The epitome of predatory publishers”). The lack of any serious editorial or peer review means that authors can publish the same thing over and over again, and that plagiarists can re-publish others’ work freely (“Does scholarly open-access publishing increase author misconduct?”). [...]
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