Awareness on questionable practices

In an effort to create awareness on the alarming rise of the predatory journals in the area of research, the research and consultancy team of ELC, organized a presentation entitled “Awareness on questionable practices: Identifying genuine and predatory publishers” for the lecturers of ELC. The presentation presented by Dr. Rehna Veerankutty Jameela, Lecturer, Engineering Department, IbriCT, was held on 11th December 2018.

As part of introduction  of  her informative, enlightening and detailed  presentation, Dr.Rehna explained and defined  the term “Predatory” and   highlighted  the ground  reality of the  existence of alarmingly huge  number of predatory publishers world-wide  in  all disciplines of study . She brought to limelight as well the reasons behind the crisis of genuine journals and the statistical figures of the academicians mostly from Asia and Africa falling prey to the trap formulated by these predatory publishers.

The presentation in detail did focus upon the underlying motives behind the operation of these predatory journals, the primary one being making profit through illegitimate means. It shed light with numerous examples on the varied strategies and tactics employed by the predatory publishers namely unprofessional homepage and alluring offers to entrap the academicians. She further explained that the alluring offers like speedy publications of the research articles and papers, privilege to publish the thesis as publications, high impact factors, less publication charges and many more entrap even the prudent academicians, if they are not highly cautious and alert.

One of the highlights of the presentation was Dr. Rehna enlisted the various parameters to be considered by the academicians to determine the predatory journals and the genuine journals. The predatory journals, she emphasized, always fail to follow the standards of scholarly publishing journals. They do not provide the peer review, which is one of the hallmarks of genuine scholarly journals .Other cues to determine predatory journals are their non-professional email addresses, contact details and indexing of journals with fictitious names of eminent scientist as members of the editorial board, she added.

A demonstration on the criteria to define genuine journals was praiseworthy as well. Dr. Rehna explained the different parameters that genuine journals adhere to namely professional homepage without any gaudy colours and scrolls, less impact factor, professional email addresses and no alluring offers and privileges for the authors of the papers. She too offered a note of caution to the participants to keep at bay the hijacked journals, the journals of OMICS groups and journals claiming to possess UGC approval.

The presentation ended with the useful links and websites on the fake and genuine journals provided by Dr. Rehna and clarifications from the participants to her.

The presentation did serve as a real eye-opener to the audience and as a token of gratitude and appreciation, a certificate of appreciation was handed over to Dr.Rehna Veerankutty by Mr. Abdullah Al Balushi, of ELC.