This has led to the inevitable unintended consequences. Most of these faculty members do not have the resources or the ability to publish in "real" journals, nor do they even understand what a good journal is. So they publish in whatever venue that accepts their paper. If it requires them to pay, then so be it. And thanks to the beauty of capitalism, a bunch of predator journals have emerged to lighten the purses of these poor folks.
Are the poor folks not getting exactly what they paid for in this instance? They wanted to be able to hit a published papers quota to get a raise/hired/not fired/whatever and the journal provided that. I don't feel like it's warranted to treat the journals customers as victims here. Both the 'predatory' journal and the customer are just playing the same shitty game set up by silly incentives being put in place by outside forces.
He means they are victims of their universities' polices.
The quoted phrase, "a bunch of predator journals have emerged to lighten the purses of these poor folks", clearly implies that the journals are out to hurt their customers.
I definitely wouldn't use "Most" here. The vast majority of faculty will publish in respected journals. Unless you can cite a source for your claim?
I don't want to pick a particular university or person to name and shame. But my suggestion would be to look at authors in the OP's journal and evaluate for yourself whether these authors are publishing in "respected" journals.
"Complaints that are associated with predatory open-access publishing include
Accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control, including hoax and nonsensical papers.
Notifying academics of article fees only after papers are accepted.
Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or serve on editorial boards.
Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission, and not allowing academics to resign from editorial boards.
Appointing fake academics to editorial boards.[34] Mimicking the name or web site style of more established journals.
Misleading claims about the publishing operation, such as a false location.
Improper use of ISSNs.
Fake or non-existent impact factors."
One could say they prey on society's trust in science.
Or perhaps the metaphor is misapplied?
Perhaps you've noticed an alarming rise in society's distrust in science, perhaps partly exacerbated by an increase in poorly peer-reviewed publications.
IEEE Access is an example of a journal which charges a hefty "article processing fee" and publishes rather mediocre papers. But I wouldn't call them a predatory journal. They do get feedback from real researchers working in the field, they do reject fake and obviously-flawed papers, and they do not just use the publishing fees to enrich themselves. The journal in the OP did none of these things.
Yes.
Fake ones like this make it off the $800 publishing fee. Since it's "open access" they just put the PDF online and call it a day. $800 isn't bad for a few hours of proofreading and updating one web page.
Also, allegedly many of these journals actually have per-paper expenses in the hundreds of dollars (!!), mostly from editor time spent soliciting and managing reviewers. That seems crazy. In contrast, major ML venues like NIPS handle all the review management in a mostly automated way and are run by volunteers. But then again, the average review quality at ML conferences seems to be pretty poor, at least compared to what I've heard about in some other fields.
I don't know if they are so evil as people say. They send me nice invitations on linkedin to interview with them :D
They appear to have interesting data and text analysis problems to solve.
the ideal is an open-access journal that is open in terms of who can read it but very closed in terms of who can successfully get an article published. that's not what we're getting these days though.
How are these guys making money? Is it just the 'editing fees' for people trying to publish? Presumably advertisers are savvy enough to not throw money at these types of journals? Proper scientists / researchers are (hopefully) also not easily fooled - and whoever peer reviewed this article (assuming it actually was peer reviewed, as claimed) won't want their name attached to the publication.
These stories come up often enough to suggest it's a well known problem, and the culprits are easy enough to identify. But that these stories do keep coming up suggests there's good money being made somehow, and attempts to thwart these publications are failing.