As an inveterate researcher myself, I find this alarming:
Some science researchers are warning about what they see as the proliferation of
online journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee.
They say nonexperts doing online research will have trouble distinguishing credible research from junk.
“Most people don’t know the journal universe,” says Steven Goodman, a dean and professor of medicine at Stanford and editor of the journal Clinical Trials, which has its own imitators. “They will not know from a journal’s title if it is for real or not.”
In fact, researchers say universities are facing new challenges in assessing the resumes of academics.
Jeffrey Beall, a research librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, has put together his own
blacklist of what he calls “predatory open-access journals.”
There were 20 publishers on the list in 2010; and now there are more than 300. Beall estimates that there are as many as 4,000 predatory journals out there — at least 25 percent of the total number of open-access journals.
So now we have to research the research. Readers, if you come across other ways of traversing what one scientist calls this "Wild West," please let me know.