Page 18 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

a great success in technological catching up, they have not been able to prevent part
of their fast growing research sector from being lured into in the trap of predatory
publishing.

Far behind, but in second place, is Slovakia, with an almost 2% share of predatory
documents, which is twice the average of the OECD countries. Nevertheless, if only
the list of individual journals is considered, Slovakia actually comes out the worst off.
Evidently Slovakia did not manage to tackle the onset of predatory publishing either.
Turkey, Mexico and Chile come out with lower shares than Slovakia, even though these
are OECD members which, at the very least given their level of productivity, are not
usually classified as developed countries. It is thus not surprising that they appear
in the upper part of this comparison.

The Czech Republic comes out with a 1.3% share as the seventh most affected country
in the OECD. Admittedly, one would hope for a better ranking. Neither, however, this
result should cause too much concern at the moment, because this is still a relatively low
share. If compared to the technologically most advanced countries, such as Israel, Japan
and the USA, or with its more advanced neighbours Germany and Austria, as well as
with the OECD average, the Czech result is only a few tenths of a percentage worse. From
a global perspective this is a negligible difference.

The results for Slovakia and the Czech Republic, which are among the worst affected
countries, contrast with Poland, Hungary and Slovenia, which scored at the opposite end
of the ranking. It is particularly surprising to find that Poland and Hungary appear,
in this comparison, with the lowest shares of predatory documents; lower even than
in Scandinavian countries, where research governance is known to be at a top level. Yet
small differences observed in the lower two thirds of the ranking perhaps should not be
overrated.

Standalone predatory journals do not sell well in OECD countries. With only a few
exceptions, their share is negligible compared with that of the predatory publishers,
especially in the less affected countries. Publication in standalone journals may be more
easily noticed, because their titles are directly reported in the Beall’s list, hence easier to
prevent. If it is the case that indeed not all journals from the list of publishers are
necessarily predatory, and that authors from countries with the most advanced research
evaluation culture are most likely to publish in the unfairly implicated ones, the vast
majority of these countries is not much affected by the predatory publishing problem.

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