Dear Chemical Education Researchers,

Like many of us, you may have received invitations to publish in open access online journals. Sometimes the invitation comes after a conference, inviting you to publish your presentation. Unfortunately, many of these invitations come, not from legitimate journals, but rather from predatory for-profit ventures that, despite claims, do not provide genuine peer review, and that survive by publishing whatever prospective authors send them, and then collecting page fees from them. These "journals" are actually fake publications that prey on faculty members anxious to share their research findings and there seem to be more of them each year. But how can you tell if a journal describing itself as peer-reviewed is genuine or fake? 

Claire McDonnell, at the Learning, Teaching and Technology Centre, Dublin Institute of Technology, kindly sent the following information to share:

A list of journals identified as questionable: http://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/
A list of possibly questionable publishers: http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/
A set of Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers: https://scholarlyoa.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/criteria-2015.pdf.

The lists were developed by Jeffrey Beall, a library professor at the University of Colorado at Denver who is very concerned about this development. Many of the fake publications do not appear to employ an effective peer review system and, although they assure people initially that there is no fee, they usually ask for one when they are just about to publish an article. These "journals" are read by very few people. However, once you publish in one you cannot publish that research in a legitimate journal. Thus, it is best to avoid them altogether. 

I hope that this information will help you to distinguish bogus journals from real ones so that your research can reach its target audience.

Loretta Jones
Professor Emerita
University of Northern Colorado
Greeley, CO 80639
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