Predatory publishing – don't get caught by surprise

The “predatory publishing” term is understood as a range of unethical publishing practices arising from abuse of open access to scientific publishing. Organizers of such a shady business gain financial benefits in return for dubious quality services that allegedly meet high standards of reviewing scientific papers. Persons using such services hope to accelerate their own scientific careers. The phenomenon was marginal for scientific communities just a few years ago. Unfortunately, recently that business has grown very dynamically. The number of pseudo-scientific journals is nowadays counted in thousands, while the number of papers published in them – in hundreds of thousands. Related businesses including innovative “high quality” bibliometric indices, “highly ranked” international “scientific” conferences, new book publishing offices are also buoyantly developing. Everybody can fall prey – one way or another – to that somehow grotesque but real phenomenon. However, young scientists at the brink of their careers are particularly endangered.

 

Goals of the seminar include:

• to provide better understanding of the phenomenon, its genesis, dynamics, extension and kinds of threats brought by it
• to warn against dangerous consequences of that shady business for individuals, scientific institutions, even for the entire society
• to give some basic knowledge how to counteract and to defend yourself.

Sure, the phenomenon is too dynamic and multi-faceted to exhaust all topics. However, the speaker hopes that the seminar will provide some valuable information not only to persons who did not yet get in touch with “predatory publishing”.

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All interested persons are invited
Professor Lu­dwik Do­brzyń­ski

NCBJ bus leaves to Świerk at 10.25 am from entrance gate to the Hoża 69 premises in Warsaw.