Predatory journals which are not open access

Question

A curiosity inspired by this answer by user Allure, on a previous question I had regarding how to recognize predatory or otherwise disreputable journals.

In the answer, it is noted that journals publishing subscription content are generally trustworthy, which seems quite reasonable, since nobody wants to pay to read (presumably) rubbish papers. Indeed, in my experience predatory publishers also tend to be Open Access, although of course the converse isn't true. My question, however, is about exceptions to this rule: are there known predatory journals (defined as being on any standard black list, such as Beall's) who also offer subscription content?

Note: there are journals whose reputation has significantly changed (and of course many journals have revised their subscription rules). My question, however, is about journals that at the same time are (or have been) both predatory and pay-to-read: are there any such cases?

Answer 1

I know of at least one physics “journal” with the following properties:

• A hybrid financing model: You need to pay to publish and to view. For whatever it’s worth, the prices are considerably below the respective ones for real journals that are only pay-to-publish and pay-to-view.

• The journal caters primarily to cranks, but you also occasionally have what appears to be clueless scientists from developing countries publishing regular (but possibly irrelevant) research.

• The journal claims to perform peer review. Articles are accepted within months (which is normal within the field).

• As you need to pay to view, I have only ever seen one paper e-mailed to me by its author (unsolicited). However, I have looked at quite a handful of abstracts. The vast majority of these are far below normal publication standards. Any peer review is clearly not effective.

• A considerable fraction of the editors the journal lists are dead, some since over a decade. Most editors were unresponsive. One alive editor did not know about this honour and got his name deleted from the journal’s webpage after I mailed him. (More on this.)

• The journal appears to be published privately by one or two people.

• I cannot find the journal on any list of predatory publishers (other than lists of journals de-listed by Scopus), but it’s worth noting that many on these lists exclusively focus on open-access publishers.

Naming the journal here would be against the ethos of the site. However, if you know your synonyms, it should be easy to find this journal and judge for yourself.

Obviously I do not know the finances of the journal and I cannot divine the real motivations of the journal’s publishers: They could be predators milking cranks or they could really believe in their cause and be just covering their expenses. So whether this meets your definition of predatory journal is up to you.

Either way, I would argue that what’s more important is what it means to publish there (or be listed as an editor):

• You spend money for publishing.
• There is effectively no peer review.
• A publication or editorship will be as worthless and damaging as one in a typical predatory journal.

This is the same as for a classical predatory journal and thus you can treat it like one when advising authors potential authors (and editors).

Answer 2

Academia.SE isn't about providing lists and evaluating specific journals is off-topic here. However, I can write a more vague/general answer.

Open access is a newer model than predatory publishing, even if the term was created with open access journals in mind. Though standards vary by field, "page charges" as well as fees for things like number of figures (often more expensive for color) were common in my field (including in reputable journals), while those journals still collected subscription fees and were not open access. Therefore, predatory journals still existed to collect those fees. Open access has merely made the publishing step more expensive for those legitimate journals, and made a predatory mimic of that model more lucrative.

Vanity press has also been around for a long time as a term that shares a lot with the predatory journal publishing, but may use different mechanisms for extracting funds, such as offering to pay authors royalties while also requiring authors to secure a certain number of books up-front (example: "we'll pay you $30 per $100 book published, but you need to sell at least 100 copies! You know, Every Author You Ever Heard Of does this thing where they actually start things off by buying 100 copies right away and sharing them with friends to get people interested! So yeah, that'll be $10,000 please!"). The scam is that the publisher doesn't actually expect or intend anyone to be interested in the book except the author themselves. Or, they may push payment for for editing costs ("your book is almost good enough to print, but we'll have our editors get it up to industry standards for $2,000"). The publisher doesn't actually spend that money on editing.

There's no "open access" in these models, but they're still extracting funds from the authors up front. Some of them may even legitimately sell copies and even pay royalties, just like some journal publishers with predatory tactics still do some level of peer review (for at least some submissions).

Answer 3

This question is more complicated than one might think at first sight. Under the traditional definition of "predatory publishing" - where one does not conduct peer review and publish everything - then the answer is clear, there are no predatory journals which are subscription-based. You hit on the reason why not. The primary buyer of subscription content is libraries. These days one of the key tools libraries use to determine what to subscribe to is usage statistics. You need people who use that library to land on your journal's webpage and attempt to access subscription content, a lot, and then you might be able to get them to subscribe. If you publish junk, you won't get these so-called 'denials', and you also get no subscribers. Predatory publishing simply did not exist before open access, for a reason.

However the definition of "predatory publishing" has become nebulous, and these days you get people defining all sorts of things as predatory:

• If the publisher sends you unsolicited marketing emails (you probably can't see this till you have more rep however)
• If the publisher charges you to read the articles or the authors to publish the articles (thereby making all OA journals predatory)
• If the publisher publishes journals without disclosing the funding source
• If the publisher sends reviewer invitations which are beyond the reviewer's expertise (every editor does this to some extent)
• If the journal has a large editorial board but very few articles are published per year (which to insiders indicates the journal is unhealthy, but not that it is fraudulent)
• The journal purposefully publishes controversial articles in the interest of boosting citation count (which makes Nature and Science predatory)
• The author must pay APC or publication fees before submitting the article (which makes many journals in economics, finance and accounting predatory)

Suffice to say, virtually every publisher in the world is predatory, depending on your definition. Put another way, you can find people who think virtually every publisher in the world is predatory. Therefore, there is no meaningful answer to your question unless you first define what predatory is. Good luck.