Microsoft Word - GJPHM-2020- Editorial.docx 107 GLOBAL JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH MEDICINE 2020, VOL 2, ISSUE 1 gggggglo Editorial Opinion THE EFFECTS OF PREDATORY JOURNALS ON QUALITY OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH Associate Professor Dr. Hasanain Faisal Ghazi Editor in Chief, Global Journal of Public Health Medicine * Corresponding Author: hasanain@gjphm.org Predatory journals as defined by Beall in 2012 are publishers “which publish counterfeit journals to exploit the open-access model in which the author pays” and also publishers that were "dishonest and lack transparency". Any journal accepts the manuscript without any real and in- depth evaluation by reviewers are considered as predatory journals. In recent years, many predatory journals have been published worldwide in many research fields. Unfortunately, some of them found in the big and trustable research databases. They are only interested in financial profit. There is no real evaluation of the paper. Once the fees are paid, the paper will be accepted and, in some cases, it can be accepted on the same day. The problem with this type of research paper when it gets indexed in those big databases and researchers start to cite all those unchecked and unevaluated researches. Some of the strategies and recommendations by universities to overcome this phenomenon can be: § Forming a committee at university level to follow up on predatory journals in reputable databases and creating a database that periodically updates for this purpose and can be made online so that researchers can view them and journals that included in them are the ones that do not create a real evaluation of the research and accept the paper quickly. § Adopting personal correspondence between the researcher and the journal to approve research for scientific promotion to eliminate the phenomenon that agents or companies sending manuscripts to journals, and this in itself is a violation of scientific evaluation and ethics of scientific research. § Adopting a minimum period between submitting the research and accepting it by the journal, so it is not possible to accept the paper within a short period as this means that the journal did not send the research to real reviewers and allow the researcher to answer the reviewers 'inquiries and make revisions to improve the research. Some journals display the submission and acceptance date on published articles. The necessity of updating the lecturers periodically by their universities about the journals that discontinued from reputable databases such as Scopus and Clarivate Analytics, as some do not know that the 108 GLOBAL JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH MEDICINE 2020, VOL 2, ISSUE 1 gggggglo journals were out form the database, as some journals are deliberately keeping the Scopus logo on its website to make the researchers think that the journal is still indexed in Scopus database. § The necessity of establishing a specialized research centre in every university called (Research Management Centre). These centres aim to manage the research process at the university level and direct researchers to publish in reputable journals. The duties of these centres are as follows: o Create a database for all research carried out by the university, whether at the undergraduate or graduate level. o Responsibility to establish research grants for researchers and funding can be from the private sector through long-term partnerships. o Conduct workshops periodically to develop researchers especially in the field of scientific publishing and select high-quality journals. o Establishing an Ethics Committee to examine and approve all research that has direct contact with humans or even animals, before conducting them to avoid many of the mistakes that the researcher may make during the collection of samples and later when publishing the research findings. o Making plans for scientific research for each faculty before the beginning of the academic year so each researcher can know what is required from him/her, such as the number of research and the number of articles that must be published in that academic year. o Researchers are periodically updated for reputable journals and also discontinued journals from the Scopus and Clarivate Analytics databases. As a conclusion, the revised definition of predatory journals should be any journal that does not follow the scientific procedure in submitting, evaluation and publishing the manuscript even if it was well indexed in big research databases. Reference • Predatory publishers are corrupting open access. Beall J Nature. 2012 Sep 13; 489(7415):179.