Objectives: Predatory publishing has been a long-standing problem across scholarly publishing for more than a decade. More recently concerned has been raised about the presence of predatory titles in PubMed Central and by extension PubMed. Research has been done to, in part, identify the extent of predatory publishing in PubMed in a disciplinary context, specifically rehabilitation, neuroscience, and neurology. This study looked to quantify the problem of predatory publishing in PubMed Central by asking a simple question, how many articles from predatory journals appear in PubMed Central?
Methods: Individual journals and publishers were identified using Beall's List of predatory journals and publishers. Journal titles were pulled out for each publisher listed. Publisher websites that were no longer online were retrieved using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and journal titles were pulled from the highest journal output for the publisher. Titles appearing on the individual journal list were deduplicated from journals pulled from the publisher’s list. Journal titles were then searched in PubMed Central with the following information collected: availability in PubMed Central, method for entry into PubMed Central, number of articles, publication date, and author manuscript funding agency.
Results: A total of 27,147 total journals were identified from Beall’s List of journals and publishers. 1,147 had articles submitted to PubMed Central by individual authors and 150 were PubMed Central titles for a total of 1,298 archived in PubMed Central. These journals made 270,642 articles available in PubMed Central; 4,280 articles were the result of direct submissions and 266,362 appeared in PubMed Central titles. Calculating from the number of articles archived in PubMed Central (6,200,000) at the time of analysis, June 2020, 4.3% were from predatory journals.
Conclusions: This analysis points to a small, but still significant presence of content from predatory journals in PubMed Central. The scale of the problem, like all discussions of predatory publishing, hinges on defining what is and is not predatory. Lists of predatory journals and publishers, like Beall’s, and PubMed Central will not always agree on an individual title. The current disagreement makes up more than 98% of the predatory article content in PubMed Central. Further work is needed to provide authors and readers the tools to assess publisher output.