Can aspects of predatory publishing be applied to some mainstream and grey journals?

Since the term predatory publishing was coined in the early 2010s, a significant research literature has emerged that carries warnings about journals issued by such publishers, while signaling the virtues of mainstream publishing. Three narratives that support the negative framing of predatory journals were identified: (1) they prioritize profit over scholarship; (2) they are assessed using qualitative warning signs rather than robust quality indicators; and (3) they are seldom named in editorial interventions, generating uncertainty about the domain of predatory publishing.

Challenges of differentiating between the quality standards of mainstream and other journals are examined by applying a "warning list" of criteria to a grey publisher representative of the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate publishing, then analyzing editorial and production attributes of a cross-section of health science journals, with a range of impact factors, indexed within a bibliometric database.

Use of predatory "warning signs" has affected progress with evaluating the relative qualities of mainstream and other journals, and meant that some innovations associated with some non-mainstream journals have been overlooked (e.g. process efficiencies in peer review and the sharing of production process data).

Sources of editorial and production practice data for comparing all journals are incomplete and dispersed. More complete quality indicators for all journals that include authors' experiences of publishing need to be openly shared and externally validated. Research funders can influence publishers' behavior by making open access funding contingent upon journals meeting both quality and timeliness indicators for peer review.