Page 28 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

The Czech Republic

Figure 7 provides details on the growth of predatory documents indexed in Scopus
by authors from the Czech Republic. On the one hand, there is a similar increasing
trend as we observed worldwide. Between 2010 a 2015 the number of predatory
documents more than doubled. On the other hand, in terms of absolute numbers, we
are looking at just a few hundred documents, which make up just over 1% of the
country's total. The "coffee grinder" evaluation system assigns on the base of these
documents to the author’s research organizations institutional funding in the range
of tens of millions of CZK per year, which is surely not trivial, yet this amounts
to only a tiny fraction, roughly thousandths, of the overall budget. From
the perspective of the system as a whole this is not a burning issue.

Since 2013, the number of points allocated by the "coffee grinder" for journal articles
indexed in Scopus has started to increase depending on the journal's relative SJR
index within the field in the range of 10-305 points (Office of the Government
of the Czech Republic 2013, p. 31). Up until then the evaluation method allocated
only 12 points across the board for any result in Scopus (Office of the Government
of the Czech Republic 2012, p. 33). Hence, the “fiscal” motive has rapidly increased.
Between 2012 and 2013 the number of predatory documents jumped up suggesting
an immediate effect. However, the stagnation after that indicates otherwise. It is
important to realize that the change in the evaluation system was approved
by the government in mid-2013, and the impact has become widely recognized only
after the first results were published at the end of 2014. Admittedly, changes
in the government evaluation system affect publication behaviour only
with a sizeable delay.7

7 During the first ten months of 2016 (up to 30th October 2016) 227 predatory documents by authors
from the Czech Republic were recorded in Scopus, so unless there is a major change in the trend for
the rest of the year, there should not be a drop nor a significant increase compared to the previous
year. It should be mentioned that the local awareness of predatory publishing has increased
enormously since 2015 when the so-called Strielkowski scandal has been reported by mainstream
media, as the result of which the academic community has started to take this problem seriously
(Komm 2016).

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