Navigating the Gray of Academic Publication: Avoiding Predatory Publishers and Creating Your “Whitelist”

Academic publishing has undergone a transition from print-based, subscription access journals targeted toward physicians and scientists to the widely accessible, open access (OA) format made possible by the Internet. The objectives of OA broadly include audience expansion and improved public access to publicly funded research, reduction of limitations on content reuse and alteration, and prompt turnaround from submission to publication. Despite well-intended founding principles, unexpected disadvantages of the OA model have arisen including the emergence of predatory journals, which exploit the author-pays publishing model with the deceptive promise of reputable publishing platforms. Predatory journals can be difficult to discern from the legitimate yet unsophisticated novice journal, which represents a destructive influence on the credibility of surgeons and scientists within many specialties. As an author, when the highly reputable, “whitelisted” journals in our field are not available or interested in the scope of our work, how can we ensure authenticity of those journals that exist in the gray area between legitimate and illegitimate? Given these questions, the goal of this article is to demystify the history and selected issues that surround academic publication including content access, licensing, indexing, and journal metrics. With this background, we then evaluate highly visible OA journals in plastic and reconstructive surgery and build a basic framework, which authors can use to evaluate a journal for legitimacy and visibility.