Instructor Guide to CUE Library Services & Resources

If you receive unsolicited emails from suspicious publishers or conference organizers, please contact CUE's Scholarly Communications Librarian:

• victoria.eke@concordia.ab.ca

In addition to helping to assess the validity of journals and conferences that you are considering submitting to, Victoria can help you to learn how to:

• Identify predatory publishers
• Differentiate predatory from reputable publishers
• Locate quality journals for your academic work

• Generic journal titles or publisher names: e.g. International Journals for Researchers
• A poorly designed website that uses generic stock photos, clip-art style graphics, and contains spelling/grammar errors
• Inaccessible or non-functional journals or the publisher only provides access to a few published articles
• No functional telephone number or postal address or the address is residential when you search it on Google Maps
• Claims that journals are indexed in certain databases when they are not
  • You can verify their claims in the library databases.
• Use of vendor names (e.g. EBSCO, OCLC) instead of database names (e.g. Medline, SCOPUS) to avoid verification
• Article-processing charges are not clearly described and are charged upon submission of work, not upon publication.
• The peer-review process is not clearly described and the journal claims unrealistic turnaround times
  • e.g. 1 week turnaround time
• The Editorial board contains the names of individuals who cannot be verified as working at the institutions listed with their names.

Learn more: Identifying and Avoiding Predatory Publishers

Predatory publishers often fraudulently use open publishing models to make money on article submissions without providing the rigorous editorial service essential to academic publishing.