Untrustworthy journals sponge on the otherwise noble concept of the Open Access movement, which aims to disseminate credible specialized information freely to the research community. Open Access strives for unrestricted access to literature, limited neither by financial nor by technical barriers, and its aim is to publish research results that underwent a regular peer-review process before being published.
A part of publishing in the Open Access mode is covering the costs for editing and typesetting of the texts, fees for server operation, etc. Therefore, today authors can use two modes of Open Access publishing for submitting their work to a scholarly journal:
Open-Access Journal
Such journals offer full texts of their articles to readers on the internet free of charge while the costs for publication of the article are covered either by the author (so-called Article Processing Charges or APCs), or by the institution which publishes the respective journal (for example Central European Journal of Nursing and Midwifery published by the University of Ostrava).
Hybrid Open-Access Journal
In these journals, access to the journal’s content is not free of charge by default, but authors have the possibility to publish their article in the Open Access mode if they pay a fee for it.
The Emergence of Untrustworthy Journals
Untrustworthy journals emerged with the aim to exploit the Open Access mode. While proper journals in the OA mode observe the common practices of scholarly publishing (peer-review, specialists in their international editorial board, etc.), untrustworthy journals not only violate these practices, but they also often try to trick potential authors into publishing their articles with them (e.g. they create fictitious editorial boards, imitate titles of prestigious journals, perform a speedy review process, etc.). The sole aim of all these practices is to make authors publish in their journal in order to collect a fee from these authors.
The year 2008 brought the first mention of untrustworthy journals, although they were not yet termed untrustworthy. At that time, the person who drew attention to them was Tim Hill, the owner of the New Zealand publishing house Dove Medical Press publishing in the Open Access mode. In 2010, Jeffrey Beall, a librarian from the American University of Colorado Denver, published on his (now-defunct) blog Scholarly Open Access a list of bogus journals’ publishers and a list of untrustworthy journals, the so-called Beall’s list. Two years later, he proposed criteria by which untrustworthy publishers could be identified. Beall updated these criteria and lists until mid-January 2017 when he cancelled the blog (therefore only a link to its archived version is provided).
Although Beall’s List gained popularity in the academic community because of the possibility of determining quickly and easily whether a journal is listed there or not, its main flaw was a lack of transparency. Jeffrey Beall defined 55 criteria of untrustworthy journals, but many of these criteria proved to be controversial, because they are either difficult to verify or their evaluation is subjective.
The method for journal evaluation that we have provided since 2017 to scholars and PhD students at the University Campus Bohunice has repeatedly undergone critical discussion, which resulted in its current 10 objectively verifiable criteria. In the following parts of this study material, we present these 10 criteria in context with the respective criteria from Beall’s list. In this way we want to help you understand that journal evaluation is not just black and white, and a complex approach is necessary.