Challenges of Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences for Open Science: lessons learned from a multidisciplinary and a multi-centric study

The InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) is committed to advancing healthy policies, improving public health, and promoting excellence in science education worldwide. It consists of several academies whose role is to inform the public and policymakers about problems and potential solutions. In line with its mission, IAP pays particular attention to Open Science, which is sometimes abused by predatory journals and conferences. For this reason, It has launched a study to improve the understanding of predatory practices and the challenges related to open science, in order to make recommendations. The working group drew on the results of a unique survey of academics and researchers from several countries, including those in the Middle East and North Africa. The methodology involved gathering information and views in dialogue with practitioners, followed by an extensive literature review. The outcomes of this study describe predatory journals and conferences as a spectrum or typology of journal and conference practices; a broad set of dynamic predatory behaviours that range from genuinely fraudulent and deceitful practices. They can be perpetrated by new or established, fraudulent or reputable, traditional or open-access publishers worldwide, with the highest level of concern expressed by those in low and middle-income countries. These practices are favored by the continuous development of Open Access. However, the EUA's Open Science Agenda 2025 recommends that OA scientific publications continue to follow quality peer review processes, in order to ensure trust in the scientific publishing system and its reliability. Promoting publication in journals with transparent and/or open peer review processes and linking financial support to publication in these journals are among the recommendations of this study. Values such as quality and integrity advocated by the UNESCO recommendation on open science must also be respected.

Keywords. Open Science– predatory journals and conferences – Ethics in science