Predatory Publishing

Predatory publishing is the practice of operating academic journals primarily for profit rather than scholarly quality, exploiting the open access article processing charge model to collect fees from authors while providing little or no genuine peer review. Predatory journals mimic the format of legitimate journals but lack editorial standards, qualified reviewers, or meaningful quality control.

The phenomenon reveals a structural vulnerability in the academic publishing system: when evaluation and access are monetized separately, the incentive to produce genuine evaluation is weakened. Predatory publishing is not merely fraud; it is an equilibrium outcome in a reputation economy where the signal has become decoupled from the underlying quality it is supposed to indicate.

The Open Access movement, by shifting costs from readers to authors, inadvertently created the incentive structure that predatory publishers exploit. The emergence of citation cartels — in which journals collude to inflate each other's metrics — is a related pathology that arises from the same metric-driven reputation economy.