کتابخانه دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی مهاباد

Some characteristics of Fake journals
By Hamid Abdollahyan
Fake journals may have many characteristics but here are some of the major ones by which you can
decide if you want to decline cooperating with them

- They ask authors to pay for publishing costs as opposed to submission costs

They are run under auspices of non-academic companies. One of the major tenets of these
companies that make them discernible from non-profit academic organizations is that their
organizational behaviors are business-oriented. These trading companies sometime cover 30
academic disciplines and publish journals for each discipline, in other words, they have mass
production and their objective is to make profit rather than contribute to the development of

sciences
- Their managers or people who run these companies may or may not have academic degrees
but they are not employed by academic institutions.

- They often advertise for their product which is publishing papers fast. They send invitations
to scholars and faculty members
Their refereeing period is very short, sometimes even less than two weeks
- They publish various journals simultaneously

Sometimes they publish 12 issues of the same journal per year.

- Often they use fake address and prefer to hunt their victims through unknown internet venues
- If you search them on-line very soon you would realize that many of their previous victims
confirm that they are fake
- If you check the writing style and scientific integrity of the papers they have published, you
would see there are obvious grammar and spelling errors in each text