Avoiding Predatory Journals and Conferences: Two More Resources

Greetings again. I hope that all is going well for you.

Imagine that an unfamiliar journal asks you to submit a paper. Or imagine that an unfamiliar conference invites you to attend.

“Is this a valid journal or conference?” you may ask. “Or is it a predatory journal or conference, which takes researchers’ money but does not provide a valid product (or any product at all)?”

As you might have seen, the AuthorAID website includes resources and tips for helping to determine whether a journal or conference is predatory and so should be avoided. You can find these resources and tips by searching the AuthorAID website using the search term “predatory”.

Recently Peter Burnett and Julie Walker at INASP noted two additional resources that can help in identifying, and thus avoiding, predatory journals and conferences. Let me say a little about these resources.

One of these resources is a webpage with links to information on various aspects of this subject. Among these aspects are predatory journal publishers, predatory book publishers, bogus (fake) conferences, predatory publishing practices, and avoiding predatory publishing.

This webpage is from the library of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. It has now been added to the AuthorAID resource library.

The other resource is a blog post about predatory journals and conferences that deceive researchers by having names very similar to those of valid journals and conferences. Researchers should check information carefully to avoid becoming victims of such pretenders.

Thank you, Peter and Julie, for mentioning these resources.

Until the next post—

Barbara