by Markus Pohlmann
Scientists might know it from their everyday lives: The number of e-mails in which they are invited to submit an article to journals, to act as an editor or to give a keynote in Barbados has increased significantly. Most of them come from predatory publishers, journals and conferences that have systematically infiltrated the field of science in recent years. Those who fall for it can lose of a lot of money with dubious benefits. It’s a kind of con game targeting scientists. Now, the first court rulings are available: In 2019, a court in the US state of Nevada sentenced one of the industry giants, the Indian OMICS group, to a fine of a good 50 million US dollars and largely prohibited it from operating in the USA. The number of “scientific” predatory journals has risen sharply in recent years, a parasitic side effect of Open Access Publishing. According to research by an investigative network of German and European Media, more than 5,000 German scientists have published in such pseudo-scientific predatory journals in recent years. In addition, in the USA, Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa constantly rising publication numbers in predatory journals are proven. In Brazil, Perlin et al. (2018) viewed over 2 million publications by experienced authors (more than 5 publications), with the result that the number of articles in pseudoscientific journals tripled between 2010 and 2015. The penetration rate in this large Brazilian publication market is still low at two to three percent, but authors are registering exponential growth.
