Table 1
Several differences between mainstream and predatory open access journals.
| Characteristic | Mainstream | Predatory |
|---|---|---|
| Peer review | Strict | Uncertain or absent |
| Costs to publish | High | Low |
| Location | Mainly in developed countries | Mainly in developing countries |
| Indexing | Recognized and with high qualifications | With less strict criteria or without indexing |
| Impact factor | High in subscription based journals | Low or absent |
| Editorial team | Recognized for their trajectory and position | Less known |
| Financial target | Lucrative or with high costs to be open access | Lucrative |
Figure 1
Google Trends of yearly web queries as proxies of general awareness about predatory publishing (PP) and predatory journals (PJ). Compared to trends of queries about predatory publishing and journals (red continuous and dotted lines), trends of web queries about open access publishing (OAP) and journals (OAJ) have more steady trends (blue continuous and dotted lines), are weakly correlated and significantly different (rPP-OAP = 0.3; rPJ-OAJ = –0.2; Both PP-OAP and PJ-OAJ comparisons had t-test p-values < 0.05). Trends of Academic and Scientific publishing were included as a reference (gray continuous and dotted lines).
Figure 2
Scopus (Left) and PubMed (right) trend reports of number of articles about Predatory Publishing (PP, red) and Open Access (OA, blue) by year. Correlations between PP-OA trends were high (Scopus r = 0.72 PubMed r = 0.87). By t-tests, differences in Scopus were in the limit (p = 0.05) and in PubMed were non-significant (p > 0.05). In Scopus, the growing trend predominantly relies on original articles (dotted red line).