Practical Advice for South Korean Medical Researchers Regarding Open-Access and Predatory Journals

Abstract

In recent decades, the volume of scholarly literature worldwide has increased significantly, and open-access publishing has become commonplace. These changes are even more dominant in South Korea. Comparing the periods of 1981-2000 and 2001-2020, the number of medical articles produced in Korea increased by 16.8 times on the Web of Science platform (13,223 to 222,771 papers). Before 1990, almost no open-access articles were produced in South Korea, but in the last 10 years open-access publications came to account for almost 40% of all South Korean publications on Web of Science. Along with the expansion of literature and the development of open-access publishing, predatory journals that seek profit without conducting quality assurance have appeared and undermined the academic corpus. In this rapidly changing environment, medical researchers have begun contemplating publication standards. In this article, recent trends in academic publishing are examined from international and South Korean perspectives, and the significance of open-access publishing and recent changes are discussed. Practical methods that can be used to select legitimate publishers, including open-access journals, and identify predatory journals are also discussed.

Keywords: Beall’s list; Directory of Open Access Journals; Medical research; Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association; Open access; Predatory.

Fig. 1

Number of total and open-access publications in Web of Science (WoS) between 1981–2020 [1]. *Categories: oncology; neuroscience; surgery; clinical neurology; optics; cardiac & cardiovascular systems; public, environmental & occupational health; radiology, nuclear medicine & medical imaging; psychiatry; gastroenterology & hepatology; immunology; endocrinology & metabolism; medicine, research & experimental (all medical categories among top 30 JCR categories). JCR, Journal Citation Reports; WoS, Web of Science.

Fig. 2

Graphical summary of the study interviewing 1,275 experienced researchers in Korea (Graphical figures drawn by the author and numerical data was referenced from the study by Kim [9]). OA, open access.