Good advice.
A group of business deans here in the United States has issued and endorsed a statement opposing predatory publishing.
The resolution is from the Business Deans of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU).
It reads, in part,
… we oppose the practice now commonly known as predatory publishing. Journals — whether physical or electronic — that purport to be outlets for scholarly research while accepting manuscripts with little or no serious peer-review and charging submission and/or publication fees to authors, demonstrate a clear disregard for time-honored intellectual and ethical standards of scholarship in their pursuit of profit.
Naturally, I think this is an excellent resolution, and I am delighted to see formal recognition of the problem of predatory publishing.
The academic field of business is particularly vulnerable to the victimization by predatory publishers and journals. Pretty much every college or university has a school or department of business, and business faculty need to publish or present at conferences to demonstrate their academic achievement.
This has led to an abundance of questionable, low-quality, and predatory business journal and conference organizers, including some owned and operated by business faculty themselves.
Predatory open-access publishers pretend to be authentic publishers, but they don’t manage peer review properly or honestly, leading to the publication of papers just so they can earn the author fees.
The deans recommend the use of my lists:
… we recommend that authors carefully scrutinize target journals before citing or submitting papers to them, utilizing all available information on publication standards, including the provision of referee reports to authors and the data annually offered by Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers as a guide
