ALLEA presents statement on 'Curbing Predatory Practices in Open Access Publishing'

ALLEA, the All European Academies association, has published a statement on 'Curbing Predatory Practices in Open Access Publishing'. The statement was presented on 23 October 2023, on the occasion of International Open Access Week 2023 and had been prepared by ALLEA's Permanent Working Group on Science and Ethics, with Professor László Fésüs (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) as principal author.

Over the past two decades, open access publishing has rapidly grown into a global industry, making scholarly publications readily available to researchers, policymakers, and the general public. While this has generally been seen as a positive development, the predominant “Gold” open access route has also given rise to unforeseen challenges. ALLEA's statement is therefore intended as both a set of guidelines and an appeal to the broader research community to collectively identify and disempower so-called “predatory” journals with subpar editorial and publication standards. According to the association, the proliferation of such outlets comes with increasingly sophisticated exploitative practices, impacting researchers, eroding research integrity, and wasting financial and human resources. Indeed, the 2023 revised edition of the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity explicitly states that supporting or using journals, publishers, events, or services that undermine research quality is a violation of research integrity norms and is considered misconduct.

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ALLEA statement: 'Curbing Predatory Practices in Open Access Publishing'