Predatory journals recruit fake editor, a new sting published by Nature. The sample in the study was a…

“pseudo-randomly select [of] 120 English-language journals that matched Szust’s expertise from each list. [JCR, DOAJ, and Beall’s List]”

The fake editor’s profile seems somewhat skewed toward the result the researchers may have been hoping for, having purported expertise in…

“the theory of science and sport, cognitive sciences and methodological bases of social sciences”.

It doesn’t seem that the proportion of the psuedo-random pick from each list was weighted, to account for the relative numbers of journals on each list which matched the editor’s profile. But since it’s been published by Nature, one has to assume that maybe the methodology was sound. The results are about what one might expect…

“40 predatory [Beall’s List] and 8 DOAJ journals appointed her as an editor … Of the 8 DOAJ journals that accepted Szust as editor, 6 remain on the directory as of March 2017.”

I note that, though perhaps it’s a co-incidence, the DOAJ has just thrown out a great many Bentham journal titles from their directory, citing ‘Suspected editorial misconduct by publisher’.

I should probably note here that Bentham has never been directly indexed in JURN, and that JURN doesn’t actively seek to directly index social studies or psychology or general education studies journals. Although some university titles in those areas will be incidentally included via general direct indexing of multi-journal OJS installations and repositories at universities. Such titles will also be included via JURN picking up article records from the DOAJ, Paperity, J-Stage and similar trusted aggregators.