A critical look at predatory and fraudulent journals: we must distinguish between sharks and small fish

Abstract

This essay discusses the issue of scientific publishing policies and distinguishes three types of journals: the large or giant commercial publishers that represent sharks or predators of science and its operators and funders, the fraudulent predatory ones that publish virtually anything without proper review for a publication fee, and the journals outside the Western Eurocentric or the United States/Canada axis that are often free or charge much lower fees to authors and generally offer open access of articles. In this sense, it was demonstrated through the scientific content curation methodology that both journals from large publishers and predatory or fraudulent journals are predatory. Thus, researchers should avoid predatory or fraudulent journals since publishing in these vehicles constitutes scientific misconduct, but it is necessary that there is a decolonial rupture in the sense of valuing local, national or regional journals, especially in the Latin American, Iberoamerican, Eastern European, Asian and other countries that also develop quality and important science, because the knowledge generated locally interests the society and the managers to solve our problems and not only be published in English, with restricted access, which hinders its apprehension by the priority target audiences to face the challenges and make the educational, political, economic, cultural and technological transformations that Latin America and the developing world demand.