In the past decade the scientific community has faced a serious threat to its integrity and credibility with the rise of predatory journals. These journals manipulate and exploit the open access publishing model but omit the quality checks and editorial services that are routinely provided by legitimate journals, such as peer review, plagiarism detection, and verification of ethical approval of experiments. Although the descriptor “predatory” has been criticised for grossly conflating poor quality with misconduct and for simplistically classifying the scholarly publishing environment into bad and good (predatory or not), the term is now widely accepted to describe the phenomenon.

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