Predatory journals accept journal articles without peer review. What predatory journals do, is they offer to publish your paper, then accept your paper as-is, then charge "page fees" for publication.They do not review for quality. This lowers the quality of academic work worldwide as researchers who are under pressure to "publish or perish" assume that it is a legitimate offer from a legitimate journal. And when other academics search for content on a topic, they might accidentally download the content from the predatory journal without realising the quality is poor.
Consider for example (we just made this name up as an example) - say, 'Journal of Business and Economics Studies.' This journal does not appear on the Department of Higher Education and Training, Science and Technology's accredited journalslist, which you can get from here:
And here is the list of predatory publishers:
If you Google such journals (not on the list), you may find that they are published by for example "Academic Stellar" (not their real name) publishers or something like that. Is its content entirely about economics? No; you will probably see that it has a range of topics. So it is not in fact a real journal. It is a predatory journal.
There are also conferences and book publishers which do this - they approach you to publish your work, because they assume you're desperate to get published and will therefore pay for it. The following article from a University of Johannesburg academic explains further.
Here is a South African author who reported this particular journal. As you can see, a trivial google of any journal will show you whether it is legit or not:
And here is a real journal just for comparison:
See the difference? Look at the work quality, content, and topic adherence. Look at the publisher guidelines. Google the word "scam" with the journal name.
- https://www.nature.com/news/stop-this-waste-of-people-animals-and-money-1.22554
- https://beallslist.weebly.com
- https://darrengoossens.wordpress.com/science-spammers/
We hope the above is helpful. You can find out more about reputedly fake book publishers here:
In this case, what the publisher does is try to get recently graduated postgraduates to surrender their copyright in order to see their thesis "published" as a book. However, the book, once published, is so expensive that no-one will really read it or buy it, and you obviously have to pay to get it "published".
