ENAI Working Group

Ethical Publishing and Dissemination

Our mission is to reduce the impact of disreputable publishers and fraudulent academic events.

Members

  • Irene Glendinning, Coventry University, United Kingdom (head)
  • Agnieszka Raubo, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
  • Ansgar Schäfer, University of Konstanz, Germany
  • Artem Artyukhov, Sumy State University, Ukraine
  • Beşir Orak, Türkiye
  • Burcu Ozge Razı, Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Türkiye
  • Cláudia Baptista, University of Porto, Portugal
  • Cristina Veríssimo, University of Porto, Portugal
  • Fatih Gungor, Türkiye
  • Ghazaleh Gholami, United Arab Emirates
  • Julius Kravjar, European Network for Academic Integrity, Slovakia
  • Kaukab Azim, Al Maarefa University, Saudi Arabia
  • Laura Ribeiro, University of Porto, Portugal
  • Milan Ojstersek, University of Maribor, Slovenia
  • Muawiyah Ahmed Hamza, King Fahad Medical City, Saudi Arabia
  • Rita Figueiras Alves dos Santos, ENAI, Czechia
  • Robin Crockett, University of Northampton, United Kingdom
  • Salim Razı, Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Türkiye
  • Samantha Oakley, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
  • Seyyed Mohammad Miri, Brieflands, Netherlands
  • Shiva Sivasubramaniam, University of Derby, United Kingdom
  • Sonja Bjelobaba, Uppsala University, Sweden
  • Sumayyia Dawood Marar, King Fahad Medical City, Saudi Arabia

Aims and objectives

  • Identify, define and characterise questionable editorial, publishing and dissemination practices
  • Promote institutional academic integrity, using existing checklists to identify disreputable publishers and conferences
  • Disseminate good practice – perhaps with reference to COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)
  • Highlight the threats from disreputable publishers and conferences
  • Provide support to students and scholars for developing knowledge and skills in distinguishing reputable from disreputable publications / journals / events
  • Conduct research about this phenomenon, for example – explore where / how / to what extent academic progression and promotion depends on the predatory industry
  • Network/collaborate with institutions, working groups, other people interested in this topic

Scope

This working group’s remit is potentially vast, covering types of malpractice in academic publishing and events, underlying factors encouraging fraud, misconduct and corruption and how they could be reduced. Even reputable publishers and event and conference organisers can have questionable processes and practices. It is easy to spot the obvious predatory and fake journals, but harder to know with some, who, for example pretend to offer peer review, but in reality accept everything submitted for payment of a fee, or reject for the targeted journal but offer to publish in an expensive Open Access alternative. We can consider the experiences from perspectives of authors, peer reviewers, editorial board members, editor, engaging with or working for various journals. Then there is scope for studies and research in consideration of different funding models for publishing and implications arising from that, including identifying and avoiding retractions and appreciating the potential limitations of preprints. Making science accessible to all. It is a huge scope. Please join us if this interests you.

Opportunities and actions

Outputs

  • Providing training. To distinguish the Ethical Publishing and Dissemination Working Group from similar projects and working groups in the same field, our main activities will be to offer to provide training and education on this subject for anyone interested. We agreed those with most benefit would be PhD students, perhaps master’s level, but may be interesting to some postdocs and researchers. Geographically anywhere would be applicable, this is a global problem. The Balkans region would be a good area to target, as there are a lot of poor quality and potentially predator publishers in Slavic languages. We welcome contact from anyone who is interested in this offer.
  • Developing training materials. The Ethical Publishing and Dissemination Working Group members already have access to a range of teaching and training materials developed by different members of the working group, individually and collectively; we must keep these up to date and continue to develop new materials.
  • Networking. We plan to invite people with specific expertise and experience in related topics to talk to our working group about their work and projects, with a view to forging relationships and gaining new knowledge and ideas.
  • Critiquing literature. Members of the group share and critique relevant literature that we come across and have started to develop an annotated bibliography to record the body of knowledge that relates to research and development in this area.
  • Conducting research. We are exploring possible options of funding sources with the aim of submitting a proposal for a research project within the next 12 months. There is need and wide scope for research in this field, therefore as a working group, we will consider what to include, how to focus our activities and what methods we should employ to conduct the research. The next task will be to write the research proposal. Current ideas for research are: 
    • developing a set of metrics that signalled integrity factors for journals, rather than a check-list of negative factors.
    • submit a project proposal under Horizon involving “citizen science”, concerning malpractices in publishing.
    • look for similarities in submitted work to a list of predatory journals, to determine how often journal papers published by them are referenced as genuine, reputable research.
  • Identifying disreputable publishers and journals. We are currently reviewing all the checklists we can find that help to identify predatory, disreputable and poor-quality journals and publishers, to create our own checklist that will help to identify where to publish and what publishing options to avoid.
  • Raising awareness. EPAD members will raise the profile of the WG, for example through publishing articles about the problems we find, attending and presenting conferences and other events such as summer schools; this will ensure that those in need of our help can take advantage of the expertise we have between us. The EPAD webpage is a key forum to make contact with interested parties. This needs to be kept up to date and relevant.

A Guide to Identifying Predatory Journals and Publishers - Checklist

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