Abstract
Deceptive publishers have been discussed and written about from a multitude of perspectives and in a variety of disciplines, but scant attention has been devoted to a particular aspect of the issue: How we as scholarly communities are dealing with the research that appears in these outlets. It is problematic that the question is not being addressed, as this research is at risk of being lost. It is at risk because articles that appear in deceptive publications are not indexed, so they are less visible, discoverable and citable. Additionally, they are not preserved and therefore likely to disappear should the publisher cease its activities or neglect to carry out basic maintenance on their archives and servers. Furthermore, it is particularly problematic because this lost science is potentially valuable. In this article, it is argued that, rather than continuing to risk the loss of this potentially important research by ignoring its existence, research disciplines should look at developments in open peer review and the increasing use of preprint servers for their potential to recover and reintegrate these at-risk articles into the scholarly record.
Highlights
A significant amount of digital ink has been devoted to the question of deceptive[1] publishers
It is an issue that affects all scholarly disciplines that engage with APC-based gold open access (OA), and as such elicits a broad range of commentaries, opinions, research pieces, checklists and, above all, warnings
Clarke and Smith discuss the problem of ‘lost science’, noting that articles that appear in deceptive publications are not indexed in scholarly databases so they are less visible, discoverable and citable.[12]
Summary
A significant amount of digital ink has been devoted to the question of deceptive[1] publishers. The good ones ask researchers to critically engage with this subject They question the use of the term ‘predatory’; reflect on a broken academic system that forces researchers to publish at increasingly onerous rates; interrogate the presence of these publishing outlets in the Global North/Western hegemony of for-profit academic publishing; and consider the limitations and racial overtones of ‘blacklisting’ and ‘whitelisting’. In all this rich literature, there is a question with which the research community is largely unengaged, which is: What do we do with the research that appears in these outlets?
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