Academic versus predator

Everyone agrees that predatory journals are a bad thing. These crafty carnivores of modern publishing are not always easy to identify. Many of them use spam e-mails to tempt authors to submit their papers – hence the nickname – exploit the open access model that charges authors to publish their work. Their key characteristic is that despite promising a respectable home for research findings, they tend to have no meaningful peer review or editorial oversight of papers. Not every paper published in these journals is junk, but you do have to wade through an awful lot of rubbish science to find anything worthwhile.