Predatory journals exposed with Think. Check. Submit

What the event covered

In recent years, the support for open access publishing has grown, with many funders and institutions requiring that researchers make the final version of their papers freely accessible to all. 

However, with the rise of open access, we have unfortunately seen the emergence of unethical actors – predatory publishers – who hope to profit from the new publishing models and to prey on unsuspecting researchers looking to publish their articles as quickly as possible.

This session looks at the nature of predatory publishers, the ethical concerns, examples of the types of predatory activities and communications, and a key resource for avoiding publishing with a predatory journal-Think Check Submit.

This webinar was designed primarily for those with little or no previous publishing experience, & those that are seeking to engage more closely with the scholarly discourse. 

The event is part of the Taylor & Francis Researcher Webinar Series 2023.

About the speakers

Victoria Babbit is the Director of Researcher Development & Outreach at Taylor & Francis.  Victoria joined Taylor & Francis in 2008 and throughout the past decade has supported researchers as they navigate the rapidly changing publishing landscape. Her work involves engaging with global research communities to build knowledge and capacity related to publishing and editorial activities. Prior to joining Taylor & Francis, Victoria conducted post graduate research in Geography at The University of Washington

Laura Wilson is Head of Research Integrity & Ethics at the Taylor & Francis group (Journals); Laura has worked in the journals publishing industry for the past 13 years, and has previously served as a board member for the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical publishers (STM), as well as a council member for the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Cenyu Shen is the Quality Team Lead for DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals). Her work focuses on leading and managing the quality team to develop processes and strategies to keep DOAJ away from questionable publishing. Since 2016, she has also been the DOAJ Ambassador for China to help DOAJ develop the China market. She built the cooperation for DOAJ with Chinese scholarly societies and publishing organizations and established DOAJ’s Chinese journals community to help more local journals be indexed in DOAJ. She was the advisory board member on the Learned Publishing DEIA special issue in 2022.

She holds a PhD in Information Systems Science at Hanken School of Economics in Finland. Her doctoral thesis explored the gold open access publishing model, its sustainable development and problems of questionable publishing. She is author or co-author of several scientific publications contained in the Web of Science, one of which have been cited for more than 800 times and ranked by The Financial Times in the 4th position among the 100 most socially influential research publications from business schools worldwide over the year 2015-2020.

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