 So I'm here with Anders Vendol and you come from well I come from Sweden and from Karolinska Institute at which actually is a medical university. And your background? Well I've been in the library for well more than 20 years now and I started my career as a mathematics librarian and maybe that's why I'm at ICTP right now. I see. And you were giving a talk and and about predatory journals in this meeting and so that's the reason why I thought we could have this interview so we can spread the word about the issue. So what is a predatory journal? Well that's a phenomenon that has increased lately like four or five years ago they started. It's basically a journal which is not very connected with academia. It's more like private enterprises and you can say that they are the characteristics are that they have a very high acceptance rate which is good of course. They have a very fast turnaround time that you will be published within days or even hours sometimes. But the the backside of this is they perform a minimal or a non-existent peer review so there is actually no guarantee that the published articles are of any good scientific quality. And you can also say that they use an aggressive mailing campaigns and I guess that all of the people that are scientists and look at this interview right now they have received lots and lots of emails from different publishers asking them to to publish in just their particular journals. I certainly have myself and often you can tell because they they say given your expectees in XYZ which is very far from mine we ask you to publish in this journal. And do they really make money on this? Apparently they do. They have an estimate from 2014 that this industry if you call that they made about 75 million dollars so they certainly make money yes. And so I would be advised to researchers to avoid getting trapped into this business. Well first of all I think you have to think have you heard about this journal before is it something that you recognize? It's a publisher clearly stated some of the journals they don't even have a publisher that just exist on their own and then can you contact the publisher? Is there any contact ways? Email? Can you contact by email? Do they have any address at all? Then maybe the most important thing is I think that you should check whether this journal not is indexed by the major databases. And in your field I guess it's Central Blatt and Math, Signnet and InSpec and all these physics and mathematics databases. If they're not indexed in those databases there is a big risk that your research will not be found. You can of course find this in Google Scholar this but I think to be indexed in one of the major databases is actually a sign of quality. And then you should look for editorial members. Can you recognize any editorial members for this journal that you know that you rely on and so forth? And then also if there is money involved which is always is how much is the money? How much is the cost for published on this particular journal? Sometimes they don't state the amount of money and when it comes to publishing you will be well disappointed I have to say the least. And also maybe the most one of the most important thing is if this journal is serious they are usually member of some industry organization and that could be like the coalition of open access science publishers and so forth and you should really find this this kind of sign on the publisher that we belong to the organization that is trustable. Exactly, exactly trustable. And so do you keep a website or do you have places that one can access to read more about this? Maybe I'll I can put it as a link to this video. Yeah but the one interesting thing about this whole business is that there is no white list there is a black list and what I recommend people for now they should check up a website from a librarian at the Denver Colorado whose name is Jeffrey Beale that's a BEA double L and if you Google for Beale and List you will find his webpage and he lists a long long list of suspicious journals and also publishers and I think if you find a specific journal that list you should be very reluctant to publish with him but also I would say that we really need a white list as well and the best I can think of is if you publish in journals that are covered by Central Brat, Inspec, MatSignNet then you should be pretty well off. You can treat it that as a pseudo-wide list at the moment. Exactly and I also understand that this predatory business feeds as predators do on the needs of a lot of people that have the pressure to publish because they need that to justify their current position or the position they're aspiring to so this is somehow they exist because there are people that are vulnerable in this environment. Oh yes there would be any business at all if people didn't publish in these journals and also they may be kind of weak papers that cannot find any other outcome than publishing these journals and in that sense but they do some kind of publishing job so to speak but the very sad thing is if you have a really good paper and you happen to publish in these journals by mistake you have kind of wasted your research but of course if you look in the many of the papers that are published in these journals they come from India they come from Africa and Asia and the journals are also mostly from India and from China and they're run by by people in those countries so it's kind of a second another world for publishing as compared to the normal publishing industry. I see and there's also the thing you mentioned in your talk that you cannot submit the same paper to two different journals so if you're happy to get trapped into one of these things and you're unhappy with it you may be stuck that your your research is in that poor quality journal. Yeah that's what the tradition in the science is that you cannot submit to two different journals at the same time and if you submit to well we had one case at my university when a researcher submitted to one of these predatory publishers and she tried she realized her mistake she tried to withdraw the journal article and and then she somehow managed to do that and then she resubmitted to a real journal so to speak and then all of a sudden they the predatory publisher published her journal article in their journal and she was published in another journal a real one and then well to the same paper in two places exactly and that's the problem of course right okay well thank you very much for your time thank you very much