Attached is an excellent letter-to-the-Editor concerning how all true scientists should react to the “predatory journals“, and I’m sure that many of us have been following these policies––without seeing this letter. We all must “fight fire with fire.”
Predatory journals are threatening the credibility of science. By faking or neglecting peer review, they pollute the scholarly record with fringe or junk science and activist research. I suggest that every publishing stakeholder could contribute to reining in these journals.
Universities and colleges should stop using the quantity of published articles as a measure of academic performance. Researchers and respectable journals should not cite articles from predatory journals, and academic library databases should exclude metadata for such publications.
Companies that supply services to publishers, including those that license journal-management software or provide standard identifiers, should decline to work with predatory publishers.
Scholarly databases such as Scopus and Thomson Reuters Web of Science need to raise the bar for acceptance, eliminating journals and publishers that use flawed peer-review practices. The US National Center for Biotechnology Information should do the same for PubMed and PubMed Central ….
Nature 16 June 2016; 534: p 326 [“Correspondence” section]