Objetivos docentes: 1. What are “predatory” journals? 2. How to distinguish them from “real” journals. 3. Why are “predatory” journals so popular? 4. What is open access and how is it used by “predatory” journals?

Discusión: Predatory journals generally solicit articles via email and make the authors pay for publication in open access journals. The fees may be as high as US $ 5000.00 and the money is generally requested to be sent to a bank in the Middle East or a developing country while the journal offices are located in the USA, England, Europe or Australia. This high fee presumably buys Gold Open Access but articles are difficult to find as these journals do not allow content identification by web-robot crawlers. Predatory articles use names and colors that are very similar to those of established journals to create confusion and have been known to hijack the identity of other journals completely. They have amateur-looking websites, they do little or no copy editing, have no editorial board or editor in chief, and do a very cursory peer review basically publishing most of what they receive. They also offer multiple language translation but this is provided via the fee Google translator tool. A list of predatory publishers may be found by visiting: http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers. Similar to predatory publishers there are now predatory meetings which are organized by the same companies that own these journals. One must pay to present at these meetings and all data becomes owned by the “sponsoring” company. The faculty in these meetings is generally comprised by individuals who are not published or who have published only in predatory journals. Lastly, authorship for sale is available through many outlets most of them located in the East. Authors are added to articles in press by 3rd parties without the knowledge of the original articles the position in the author byline is sold. Additionally, articles of any topic may be ordered with the most common ones, least expensive, easier to create, and higher level of evidence in medicine are the meta-analysis of the literature.