Page 22 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

Nevertheless, in countries with a large number of indexed documents, in the order
of thousands or tens of thousands per year, such as in India, South Korea, Russia,
Malaysia, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and a few others, a high share evidently
indicates a systemic problem.
It is worth to notice that the scale on the vertical axis is different on this figure from
the previous one. The propensity to publish in predatory journals is significantly
lower in OECD countries than in the rest of the world. The only OECD country that
appears in the figure of most affected countries is South Korea but far from the top
of the ranking. Yet this underlines how serious of the problem of predatory
publishing is in this otherwise developed country. It would be difficult to find any
other socio-economic indicator for which South Korea is on a comparable level with
South Africa, Ukraine or Eritrea. Slovakia, which ranked as the second worst
in the OECD, takes 66st place in the worldwide comparison. The Czech Republic takes
83th place, roughly half way down the ranking.
Surprisingly, the opposite end of the spectrum with the lowest shares of predatory
documents in also dominated by developing countries. Some of them have the shares
of predatory documents very close to zero and in a few cases there are no authors
publishing in predatory journals whatsoever. These include many of the least
developed countries, such as Chad, Haiti, Congo (Dem. Rep.), Madagascar and Mali.
Arguably, they are so behind the curve that the pandemic of predatory publishing has
not to reach them.

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