In exchange for a hefty fee, these journals—with names such as Journal of Clinical Toxicology and Enzyme Engineering—offered quick peer review, which often meant no review whatsoever. “They were journals I’d never heard of,” Jeffrey Beall, an associate professor and librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, said. “Often they were based in West Africa or South Asia, with titles close to existing ones, and filled with grammatical errors. Basically, they were just pay-to-publish operations.” … For years, though, Beall provided one of the only listings of the ne’er-do-wells, and in late Ja
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