by Venus R. Parmisana
In a concrete response to recurring concerns of faculty researchers on how to determine predatory journals, the Office of the Graduate Studies, through its Director Dr. Alita T. Roxas, conducted the Information and Education Forum on Predatory Journals on October 3, 2018 at the Boardroom of the MSU-IIT.
Serving as an echo seminar, the forum had Dr. Franco G. Teves, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, for a Resource Speaker. In an opening statement, Teves remarked that the term “predatory journal” was first coined by University of Colorado Librarian Jeffrey Beall.
“Journals and publishers that have not authentically performed peer-review process, especially after receiving a hefty amount for the publication charges, are meted with label in the widely-followed “Beall’s List”, said Teves.
Highlighting Teves’ lecture were the four ways to identify a “probable predatory” body.
(1) The journal or publisher is just a money-making scam. It is believed that articles with glaring grammar errors and goobledygook (unintelligible jargon) content, would go unnoticed and yet were given acceptance letters after the journal had allegedly siphoned huge fees, at times for both submission and publication, that could go as high as thousand dollars;
(2) With proliferating journals from any parts of the globe, authors would fall easy prey to these dubious journals as they entice authors with their aesthetically designed websites, multi-racial board members or peer reviewers, and the much-publicized tourism packages. Meanwhile, some reviewers have unverifiable identities and these websites have missing address or mixed up location details of publishers; everything fell short of professionalism.
(3) Further hint goes to the almost zero percentage of unaccepted papers whereby abstracts or papers in the sciences and engineering nevertheless end up in the arts, humanities, and social sciences-themed publications; and
(4) Finally, one can investigate on the publication frequency which reveals either having lagged issues or having multiple and simultaneous production of different journals under the same publishing company.
Dr. Teves, together with Dr Roxas, addressed the participants’ questions and concerns during the open forum and assured them of another round of in-depth discussion on the subject matter very soon.
Capping the lecture, Teves encouraged the participants to not rely solely on the Beall’s List but also use Web of Science or Clarivate Analytics (https://clarivate.com) and the Directory of Open Access Journal (https://doaj.org/). Also, Teves briefly mentioned the International Conference on Environment and Forest Conservation (http://icefc2018.msu.edu.ph) on November 18-20, 2018 as one commendable conference that MSU-IIT researchers can possibly attend.
In her closing remarks, Institute Academic Promotion Vice Chairperson , Dr. Rohane Derogongan, stressed on the merit of publishing research outputs in reputable journals and publishing companies as stringent policies on re-ranking and promotion are ensured in the IAPP.