Preventing Temptation of Predatory Journals

KOMPAS/ESTER LINCE NAPITUPULU

The number of professors in Indonesian tertiary institutions is still minimal and they have not been productive in publishing their research results in reputable international journals.

Spam from the managers of predatory journals always floods email. In a week, there are three to four emails of this kind that go into the Spam folder.

Predatory journals usually use names that are similar to well-known international journals and offer quick publication with relaxed peer reviews or no review process at all. They charge tens to hundreds of US dollars. They usually accept manuscripts of as diverse topics as possible to enable extensive and frequent publications containing a large number of articles in each edition.

In addition to utilizing joki (broker) practices through ghostwriting services, some academics sometimes use predatory journals as a shortcut to get their research papers published to earn the academic credits they need to be promoted to functional positions.

A friend who teaches at a private university in Jakarta said that the Directorate General of Higher Education already had guidelines on publishing research papers with a warning and a list of predatory journals. If a paper was published in a predatory journal, it would disqualified. However, some are desperate and persist on pursuing publication in such journals. Moreover, he said there were predatory journals that appeared on the Scopus index.

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> Tempted by Shortcuts, Academics Put Integrity in Peril

> Ghostwriting Puts Academic Expertise at Stake

I once opened the website of a predatory journal that covered the social sciences. The journal’s manager promised an acceptance time of between five and seven days for an article. The monthly journal carried dozens of articles. According to the international Index Copernicus, the journal published 784 articles in its 12 editions in 2022, or an average of 65 articles per edition. The January 2023 edition contains 101 articles, 60 percent of whose authors are from Indonesian universities.

The number of articles seems fantastic when I compare it with, based on my own experience, two other social sciences journals, namely the Journal of Indonesia Social Sciences and Humanities (JISSH), which is managed by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (now the National Research and Innovation Agency), and the Journal of ASEAN Studies (JAS), which is managed by Binus University.

JISSH is now accredited with the third level of the Science and Technology Index (Sinta), while JAS is Sinta 1 and has been indexed by Scopus since 2021. Managed by the Education, Culture, Research and Technology Ministry, Sinta has six accreditation levels, with Sinta 1 as the highest level.

JISSH and JAS both publish two editions per year, with less than 10 articles per edition. The paltry number of articles is partly attributable to their strict editorial selection policies to maintain the journals’ quality.

No ‘walk in the park’

Based on my experience, it takes eight months to process an article from the manuscript’s submission to its publication in JAS, and around five months for JISSH. The process is quite long because an incoming manuscript will pass through the editorial desk first, undergo a blind review, and then be sent back to the authors for improving the manuscript based on the input from reviewers. It is then proofread and laid out, and then undergoes a final check by the authors before the articles are published.

A blind review is quite an adrenaline-filled process because our manuscripts are read by people with expertise on the main topic. The author does not know who the reviewer of his or her manuscript is, and neither does the reviewer know who is its author, because the author's name will have been removed from the manuscript. Possibly requiring more than one round, a blind review is quite time-consuming because journal editors also have to find reviewers who are suitable for the topic and context of the paper’s locus and are willing to spend time reading and providing input.

In mid-2022, I was asked to be a reviewer for a Scopus-indexed journal with a SCImago journal rank of Q1 (first quartile), or the top 25 journals in a specific field. This journal is affiliated with a privately funded research university in California, the United States. I thought they had contacted me because the topic of the manuscript was the same as one of my articles that had been published in that journal. I was given a month to review the manuscript before coming back with a recommendation as to whether the manuscript should be accepted with minor revisions, sent back to the author for another review, or rejected. A month and half after I had submitted my review, the journal’s editor made a decision about the manuscript. On looking at the time spent on the reviewing process, it took around three months for the author to find out whether their manuscript had been deemed worthy of publication.

Also read:

> Teachers can be Trusted and Followed

> Practice of “Joki” Rampant, Like a Factory of Scientific Works

At other journals, the review process can take even longer. Asraf, a colleague of mine from Bangladesh who was then conducting a doctoral research in the field of climate change and sustainable development policies in Portugal, said it took 6-8 months on average to have his paper published in a reputable international journal. He said it could even take a year, as he had previously experienced, only to learn that his proposed article had been rejected. “The decision was a rejection. It hurt," he recalled.

Benni Yusriza, an international relations lecturer at Paramadina University in Jakarta, had to wait a year and a half before his article was published in the Q2-ranked Asian and Pacific Migration Journal. In fact, he had submitted his manuscript on an invitation to write for a special issue of the journal edited by a researcher at Australia’s Monash University, who had found Benni’s master thesis in Monash’s thesis repository. It was that thesis that only needed reworking to match the journal’s editorial format. However, he found himself feeling obliged to carry out a major revision to improve the structure and strengthen the theoretical framework and literary study.

The decision was a rejection. It hurt.

“It’s a breath-suspending undertaking to read the input from the reviewers. But that's not all. [The results of] reviews came somewhat suddenly, and [I was] given two months to revise or resubmit it from scratch," he said.

It truly took extra effort on his part, to the extent that he asked for help from his colleagues who were studying abroad to access the latest published articles. While revising his article, he was also dealing with his other work piling up.

However, once the article was published in that reputable journal, all the long and tiring work paid off. In the end, refraining from temptation yields greater contentment than falling into the easy track of predatory journals or joki practices.

This article was translated by Musthofid.