Predatory journals

Come to papa... Publish with me..
image from: http://gamelore.wikia.com/wiki/File:Predatory_Sliver.jpg

I know it has been a long hiatus but I am still around!

Been trying really hard to graduate recently with lots of great motivation coming in all directions! So you will hopefully start to catch me here once in a while again =)

Anyway, this entry arose because of my receiving of several emails asking me to give talks and to publish in some journals since 2012, sometimes in fields that I am not even familiar with! Inner alarm started sounding and I did a search on the Internet. I found that some researchers have been duped into submission of their articles and in many cases, ended up having to pay an amount of money publishing something the journals invited you to publish in the first place! Some even have really scientists of substantial stature on their editorial boards. I emailed this article to my labs back then. 

For me, my inner alarm started blaring when first off, they didn't even get my designation right - I haven't even gotten my doctorate yet - these people did not even bother looking that up. Second, the field is completely foreign to me. Third, or they were sending me the email based on a singular something  I wrote eons ago for a non-scientific audience. I bet there are other telltale signs to realize something fishy is going on.

With the Internet rampant with information, falsity and veracity interweaved, it is ever harder to discern between the forces of good and evil. I mean, look at Wikipedia! (While I really love Wikipedia and there are numerous excellent entries on Wikipedia, please do NOT cite Wikipedia as your reliable go-to...)

Here's a list of predatory journals for scientific submissions that I thought will be useful to compile and keep it here for posterity and my own reminder. 

Let me know if you have/found any others or any interesting articles and would like to add to this. I will update. Also, any tags I should put to this post?

John Bohannon has a really enlightening article about this on how he recently tricked the world into thinking eating chocolates can help you lose weight. This probably would require another post for another day. But this article wants you to know what to critique when you read certain science.

Here goes:

1) This is based on an article in Science, with a good amount of evidence.

2) This is the infamous Beall's list. "Beall defines a "predatory" publisher as one whose main goal is to generate profits rather than promote academic scholarship" -- The Chronicle of Higher Education 2012
3) the Nova series