Legitimate publishing in academic research requires accurate education on research ethics and integrity which is one of the most important parts of the curriculum of training researchers. Early exposure of young researchers and students to this training has a central role in building good research capacities and policy to prevent serious deviations from international standards, such as publishing in predatory journals. Based on our survey, we were able, through distance education, to significantly improve the knowledge of young researchers in Morocco on predatory publishing practices. Importantly, participants were proficient in identifying most hallmarks of this issue after the webinar delivery.
The advent of novel learning technologies such as webinars during COVID-19 has massively and remarkably increased access to trainings on outstanding science that was difficult to attend before the pandemic because of geographic constraints (Bryson, 2020). More importantly, this valuable transition from face-to-face learning to online education has also enabled access to researchers from LMICs to high-quality trainings using webinars provided by research institutions and organizations from the developed world (Merritt et al. 2019). Remarkably, another notable advantage of this novel learning approach is the ability to deliver scientific contents without costs and logistic obstacles related to organizing physical face-to-face meetings and travel requirements such as visas and flights. This has promisingly increased course attendance of young scientists from LMICs to foster career development skills. Thus, distance education may enhance the transition of early- and mid-career researchers to research leaderships in these countries.
The common strategy of predatory journals to solicit submissions from researchers is accomplished via bulky spam emails (Clemons et al. 2017). In this path, our survey results revealed that ~ 40% of participants received mail solicitations from predatory journals and 9% did not know if they were predatory. Peer-reviewed journals rarely invite authors to submit manuscripts based on this approach, therefore, this proportion may be higher among the attendees of our webinar. Junior faculty members are particularly the target of these mails as they need publications for academic and job promotion. This category of researchers is prone to responding to these predatory journals. They expend an important amount of time to daily read and analyze these mail requests for publishing their articles, participating in predatory conferences, and also joining their editorial boards (Wilkinson et al. 2019). As expected, Scopus indexing and Impact Factors according to Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate Analytics®) were selected by the majority of participants as the most important qualitative parameters to be considered during journal search and selection for publication. Scopus database is considered as a white list for selecting journals in many countries including Morocco. Moreover, it is also an endorsed measure for delivering funding and honoraria to researchers and it is also recommended by universities when according permissions for defending dissertations in these settings. However, Scopus contains an important amount of non-peer-reviewed literature from predatory journals (Cortegiani et al. 2020b, Cortegiani et al. 2020c), and therefore it should not be used as a unique standard when recommending good practices for publishing in academia. Unfortunately, this is the case of many institutions in LMICs such as Morocco. As such, over-reliance on the Impact Factor metric in academia has also involved some criticism (Ali 2021; Aroeira et al. 2020; McKiernan et al. 2019). The real contribution of published science should not be based on metrics only, but also on the true impact of the findings. Thus, its potential misuse should be avoided and young researchers in LMICs trained to focus on good methods to produce actionable results.
Surprisingly, only 30.8% of the surveyed participants considered that peer-review is of importance in journal publishing. This outcome may be explained by the fact that an important number of Moroccan researchers and students are not well informed and trained about the impact of this required and decisive process in science. Indeed, they rarely benefit from workshops that provide educational sessions on epistemology in research methods and integrity. Moreover, the current doctoral programs focus more on tangible journal publications rather than the methodological rigor used by researchers to yield impactful and reproducible findings. In fact, this is in line with the widely practiced “publish” or “perish” concept (Barrett, 1962; Guraya et al. 2016; Al-Adawi et al. 2016). This movement has caused more negative collateral consequences to LMICs such as predatory publishing and the remarkable attention given to bibliometric indicators, as well as the focus on “publishability” rather than the value of the content of local research. This also raises concerns about the misuse and distortion of the journal Impact Factor and Indexing in academic publishing. Recently, several Moroccan universities have launched an honorarium program to reward researchers and their affiliations based on bibliometric indicators of their publications (https://leseco.ma/sciences/luniversite-sidi-mohamed-ben-abdellah-lance-une-prime-a-la-production-scientifique.html). According to some Moroccan researchers, this grant package may positively affect their research and satisfaction of the research environments in local universities. However, rewarding researchers based on these metrics only rather than on the impact of their findings and quality may negatively predict a future in which publications are more important than research findings and methods quality. This harmful pay-per-publication system based on allowance programs is well known in other countries (Quan et al. 2017; McKiernan et al. 2019) and has just arrived in some LMICs such as Morocco. Therefore, the creation of academic funding agencies rather than these aberrant monetary reward systems is awaited to receiving funding to merited projects and build academic skills that may improve country development indicators.
In addition to the previous observations, targeting journals that use subscription-based model had the lowest importance to participants in this survey despite that it is the most adapted publishing model for LMICs. This may be due to the emergence of “open access” which is nowadays increasingly being used worldwide including LMICs as compared to the traditional subscription-based scholarly publishing (Matheka et al. 2014; Singh et al. 2021). Open access publishing requires funding which, in the case of respectable open access journals, involve high publishing fees that are not affordable by authors in LMICs (Singh et al. 2021; Newton, 2020). Thus, cheap open access as supported by predatory publishing in LMICs is the most adopted solution in these settings as widely reported. Hence, there is an urgent need to train scientists in LMICs on this issue and also reframe the whole process of open access publishing to address this ongoing problem. Stringent and reasonable criteria should be developed to unravel the real cost of publishing in open access journal; which, in most cases, is overestimated and not well justified by publishers. The absence or the low quality of peer-review in predatory journals is only a piece of the puzzle of this issue. The so-called open access indexed and peer-reviewed journals with established academic publishers may also have predatory behaviors as well; including racism (Niriella et al. 2021), flawed or decreased quality peer-review process (Van Vlokhoven 2019; Erfanmanesh 2017; de Jong, 2017), and remarkably the high fees of open access proposed to researchers in emerging economies. This raises the question of categorizing peer-reviewed journals that place constraints to science from LMICs into predatory journals.
Although incomplete and questionable for some cases of potentially predatory journals, the Beall’s list is still widely used by academicians and students to categorize fraudulent publishers and predatory journals (Strielkowski 2018; Strielkowski, 2017). The currently updated list of predatory journals (https://beallslist.net/) is consulted for research purposes and also by authors wishing to verify journals. This trend was also noticed for our surveyed participants with more than a half of them indicating that they will routinely use this list to identify predatory journals and publishers.
The phenomenon of “predatory scholars” is another issue in LMICs. Researchers who have developed their curriculum based on predatory publishing may become university professors and also decision makers. Once becoming principal investigators and mentors in academia, the likelihood of publishing in predatory journals by their students tends to be higher, which in turn promotes the spread of this attitude in junior researchers. In our survey, 13 participants (5.9%) indicated that they published in predatory journals because it was recommended by their supervisor which might also be in line with this observation. Publishing in predatory journals may harm the professional career of researchers and their reputation (Ward 2016; Shrestha, 2020). A recent study investigating the perception by PhD students of predatory journals found that such research ethics violation had a negative impact on their career (Wang et al. 2021). This outcome is similar to our findings and other authors’ results (Rawas et al. 2020), suggesting that predatory publishing can damage career development.
Remarkably, the results of our survey showed that most participants were motivated to share their knowledge on predatory journals with their colleagues. Moreover, they acknowledged that they were committed to avoid submitting their research to predatory journals after the webinar delivery; suggesting that this distance education approach was effective in increasing awareness on the harms that predatory publishing may cause. The rest of participants (13%) indicated that pressure to publish is still notable and they will submit their manuscripts to these journals. In fact, this behavior from scientists feeling high pressure to publish was widely reported as a principal factor affecting “publishability” in predatory journals (Rawas, et al. 2020; Cobey et al. 2019). A recent systematic review of the causal factors that affect the decision of authors to publish in predatory journals confirmed that publication pressure contributes to this phenomenon (Mertkan et al. 2021). This tendency was noticed in research environments in which authors have a limited ability to publish in reputed journals (Mertkan et al. 2021). Similarly, our survey results showed that Moroccan researchers are also affected by this problem of pressure to publish by their mentors, affiliations, or funding agencies suggesting that this is not limited to developed countries.
Our study has a number of strengths and also some limitations. To the best of our knowledge, only one tutoring session based on distance education for increasing awareness on predatory publishing is available for citation (Babb and Dingwall 2019). This was a webinar that was developed for Canadian health professionals (n = 33) to improve their knowledge on predatory journals and how to critically review the medical literature. Our education sessions were developed with two languages and were of the highest enrollment to date (n = 221). We covered all Moroccan public universities which is also promising for knowledge sharing between researchers. Notably, awareness on predatory publishing was considerably improved after our webinars. Most importantly, the majority of participants were PhD students and had not published any papers to the date of the online workshop which is promising to prevent any infiltration of predatory journals to their future career. Moreover, these attendees were motivated to share their novel knowledge with colleagues that did not participate in this educational session. This is of high importance to continue the discussion in national research institutions for a wide reporting of this issue. However, despite these encouraging outcomes, the proportion of participants seems to be low when compared with the number of registered PhD students in Moroccan universities. Remarkably, we failed to attract university professors to this webinar (4 only). This category of decision makers has the potential to effectively impact the research work environments as compared to junior researchers. We also failed to have MD/MD students in our educational course (n = 4), especially that they belong to the most affected fields in terms of publishing in predatory journals (Marina and Sterligov 2021). Remarkably, while most participants indicated that they would use the newly learnt information in their future publishing behavior, it is difficult to evaluate whether they actually did or not. Conducting a longitudinal study would have been more effective to inquire about how gained knowledge from this educational intervention will be used. Finally, another limitation is the design and the single-country nature of our cross-sectional survey-based study which may not represent a global viewpoint of LMICs.
Some perspectives and recommendations can be shared after these preliminary outcomes of distance education to join the global fight against the threat of predatory publishing. Training on predatory publishing, research integrity and how to critically appraise academic literature must be institutionalized. Real engagement of youth as trainees and also as trainers is needed to fight against scientific malpractice in LMICs. Open science through open access -this false gold- requires institutional funding. Indeed, LMICs cannot produce practice-changing findings with the use of current open access journals that in most cases are predatory and in other cases put barriers to authors from these settings. Therefore, one of the truthful solutions is to halt the transformation of hybrid journals into fully open access and allow authors from LMICs to share their accepted non-edited publications without legal copyright restrictions. Building associations and organizations, such as Moroccan Association of Research and Ethics that organized one of these courses, may have a remarkable role in training young scientists in LMICs by providing free webinars and workshops to implement good education on research methods and ethics. Moreover, creating research integrity committees to survey researchers’ practices in LMICs and centers of “journalology” to deliver recommendations on where local science should be published are awaited. The Canadian Center of Journalology of The Ottawa Hospital (http://www.ohri.ca/journalology/predatory-journals) is a good example of these initiatives and frameworks that should also be implemented in under-resourced countries as it requires well-trained teams only.
Another issue that promotes the proliferation of predatory publishing in LMICs is the low quality of research conducted in these resource-constrained environments. This is the principal reason for not attracting good academic journals of the developed world to consider LMICs-based science for publication. LMICs may benefit from the current advances in scholarly publishing transparency such as the emergence of the open peer-review initiative which will certainly offer an approach to improve the quality of local science. Unpublishable science from LMICs that is lost in predatory journals should be published in journals of LMICs developed with high standards of methodological and ethical rigor instead of waiting for highly impacted journals to take care of their settings-associated problems. This is achievable in the digital era; conditioned by accurate training of the marginalized youth in LMICs. In this perspective, investing in people to drive research and train the research workforce using the advantages of distance education may help in reaching this goal. Absolutely, we all rely on publications to improve countries development indicators such as health, but rigor in generating and publishing data is required.
