You are a young scholar and you open an email from an offical sounding organization that is inviting you to submit your work to its highly esteemed refereed journal!  Wow you think this is great, someone has followed my career and thinks I do good work. . . .

Nope!!!!  You are in the sights of a predatory publisher (PP) who would like to do nothing more than relieve you of a few hundred dollars (US of course), pounds, or euros (amazing how prices are always in a hard currency) for posting your article to their website (heck they may even format it to look like a journal article at the better PP’s).

Until this year there was a great site for checking possible PP’s – Beall’s List of Potentially Predatory Publishers along with lists by journal name.  A quick Google search will find you copies of that list (beallslist.com seems to be complete) but it is going to get dated fast (last update was August 2016).

So, what can I suggest to junior faculty and PhD students?  It is the old Mark Twain adage “if it seems to be too good to be true, it probably is!”  Or in simple English, no one is going to come along an offer you a journal publication.  There are no shortcuts to publishing in venues that are worth publishing in.