When accounting Professor Arline Savage, Ph.D., gets mad she hits the books. "My research is all over the place, because what appeals to me is usually something that made me angry," she said.
Fed up with a flood of email solicitations from questionable research journals, Savage began digging in to the murky world of pay-to-publish open access journals. These outlets also are known as predatory journals, because they don't have any subscribers or perhaps any actual readers at all. Their prey is the author — a faculty member or graduate student with research to publish — and the bait is a publication in a supposedly legitimate scholarly periodical. But their only real concern is attracting publication fees and other tolls, Savage said. "It's a moneymaking racket."
Now Savage and two co-authors have published a combined stakeholder analysis and call to arms opens a new website in the prestigious "Journal of Business Ethics." Their research already has led to new policies in the Collat School of Business, and Savage is helping lead calls for the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), which accredits business schools around the world, to take a stand against predatory journals.
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