Collaboration With F.O.R.M. To Promote Awareness About Predatory Practices
On May 16, 2023
We were thrilled to collaborate with the Forum for Open Research in MENA (FORM), contributing an event to their Community Development Series. Titled Rise of the Predators: How to identify and avoid predatory publishers and conferences’, this webinar explored the profound change in scholarly communications ecosystems produced by the shift to open access publishing models. With open access content free to readers, publishers had to find alternative sources of revenue – the authors. This ‘pay to publish’ trend attracted a large number of fake, predatory publishers who charge inflated fees and provide low quality publishing services in low quality journals. A similar trend is also apparent in the conference sector, with predatory organisers demanding high fees for poor-quality or even completely fake events.
Hosted by Dr Emily Choynowski, our Head of Research Development and Dissemination, this webinar highlighted the threat posed by the predators who have emerged as the transition of scholarly communications to more open practices, and gave tips on how to identify and avoid them. In particular, she discussed how the open access movement gave rise to predatory practices and how these predators can harm individual researchers and threaten the wider academic community; how predatory publishers operate and how to identify fake journals; and finally how to identify and avoid predatory conferences.
F.O.R.M
The Forum for Open Research in MENA (FORM) is a non-profit membership organisation supporting the advancement of Open Science policies and practices in research communities and institutions across the Arab region.
The Arab states have the resources and capability to play a pivotal role in the global transition towards more accessible, sustainable and inclusive research and education models. We want to support all our research communities and stakeholder groups in the journey towards a more ‘open’ world, by facilitating the exchange of actionable insights and the development of practical policies.
More details: https://forumforopen.org/