Predatory journals: The view from Brazil

Global academic publishing can often be reminiscent of the tale of the black swan. In England in the 17^th century, a ‘black swan’ was a metaphor for a rare or impossible event, that was until 1697 when Dutch explorers found black swans happily swimming around in what is now called Western Australia. The shock of such an event is palpable, but more serious are the assumptions and superiority that such beliefs are based on, that all that exists does so in some small corner of Western Europe.

With journal publishing, blind spots in the West for scholarship outside its dominant paradigms and English language have been well documented, but perhaps not well heeded. And while many people have worked to raise the profile of research from the Global South and other neglected areas, the feeling is that there is a huge amount of value wasted just because a narrative is different, or the language is different.

Dark side

If there are many good journals and publications that are being missed, however, we also have to accept that some of the problems in English-language journals will also appear elsewhere. This point was brought home recently when I was made aware of a Brazilian study published in the proceedings of the ABEC conference. The authors were from the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (IBICT), and the study was entitled ‘Mapping of Brazilian journals with predatory editorial practices’. It assessed 66 journals that had been identified by scholars in Brazil as predatory in their practices based on a large-scale survey of nearly 5,000 authors.

The characteristics of the journals will sound familiar enough to those who have followed the rise of predatory journals in the English-speaking world – journals claiming rapid publication, fee charges, and very short review times. We used AI to translate the article and its findings, which suggested the journals posed a threat to scientific integrity, and that there was a need for qualitative analysis, improved screening criteria, and community awareness to combat predatory publishing practices to safeguard research quality.

Watching brief

The scale of the problem as well was all too familiar, with 10% of those surveyed naming the same 66 Brazilian journals studied, with a high reliance on ‘spam’ emails soliciting submissions as their main activity. The study concluded by stating the harm such journals can have on scientific communication, and recommended that a response should include the publishing of lists of (verified) predatory journals, educating the scientific community to recognize such practices, and revising editorial quality criteria for indexing services to exclude predatory journals.

That there was a problem in Brazilian journals was not a surprise, but a quick search pulls up hardly any discussion about it online, and we are indebted to the team at Universidades News for sharing the details with Cabells and highlighting issues in Brazil and Latin America. As the article itself states, the significance of the findings is not just the prevalence of predatory journals in Brazil, but the need for greater awareness and stricter standards across all stakeholder organizations to protect researchers and the precious outcomes of their labor. And what is scary is that this ‘black swan event’ is likely not just to be limited to Brazil, but to every country and region with significant research output outside the English language.

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