Vanity publishing and predatory publishing are two models which allow publication without any of the normal processes of editorial or peer review.

In vanity publishing, the author usually pays for the publication of the material, which is usually these days delivered via print on demand, incurring little to no cost to the publishing house. Vanity presses often have no selection criteria and provide none of the normal services of a publishing house, such as legal review, proofreading, copy editing or fact checking. There is a list of vanity presses and self-publishing houses at Wikipedia:List of companies engaged in the self-publishing business. The best known is probably lulu.com.

In academia, vanity publishing has also been referred to as "write-only publishing". There may be no charge to the author, and the publisher may make their money by selling copies at high prices solely to libraries of record (large university libraries, the Library of Congress etc). Publishers called out for this practice include Lambert Academic Publishing, IGI Global[1][2][3] and Edwin Mellen Press. These books may publish fringe thought and may be used to inflate the reputation of otherwise mundane authors.

Predatory open access[edit]

Predatory open access publishers charge high transaction fees to authors and publish based on payment, not credible peer review. This came to prominence in part through the work of Jeffrey Beall, who maintained "Beall's List" of predatory publishers and journals. Beall was silenced by legal threats from a publisher he had criticised. New models are emerging for assessing journal quality, including the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Cabell's blacklist.

Red flags for predatory publishing include:

Keep in mind that a journal meeting one or more of those criteria does not guarantee that it is predatory, but the more criteria are met, the likelier it is. Predatory publishing is also a relatively new phenomenon, so publications established prior to the 2000s are unlikely to be predatory.

Use in the real world vs use on Wikipedia[edit]

In the real world, it is possible that a work published in non-peer reviewed venue like a vanity press or a predatory journal represents excellent scholarship. One can write an absolutely correct and rigorous analysis of a topic that would pass peer-review and would be considered authoritative in the field by experts, but publish it elsewhere for one reason or another. For example, Grigori Perelman submitted his proof of the Poincaré conjecture to arXiv, an unreviewed preprint repository. Perelman's proof has been examined by many mathematicians, who certified it as a correct and brilliant proof, for which he was offered the 2006 Fields Medal (he declined). In this case, Perelman's papers are considered reliable sources, because independent reliable sources consider them to be excellent scholarship.

Vanity presses venues can also by used by honest researchers for non-nefarious print on demand purposes, like a reference work intended for distribution in a handful of research centres and libraries, with no commercial potential.

However, Wikipedia cannot conduct such an expert analysis of sources, and must instead rely on the analysis of other experts in the field. Even if you are personally qualified to conduct such an analysis, on Wikipedia it would be considered original research, and is not allowed. Nonetheless, some non-peer reviewed sources are known to be more likely than others to be reliable based on their reputation.

We know there is a difference in reliability of these two venues because arXiv papers are extensively cited in research and that recognized experts make extensive use of this venue, while viXra is almost universally ignored by the research community. In the words of Gerard 't Hooft:[4]

When a paper is published in viXra, it is usually a sign that it is not likely to contain acceptable results. It may, but the odds against that are considerable.

On Wikipedia, we, unlike scholars, cannot assess individual published works. We must instead rely on the reputation of the venue in which something is published. Preprints in reputable repositories like arXiv, bioRxiv, PeerJ Preprints, socArXiv and so on, are typically treated as self-published expert sources and can only be used to support basic uncontroversial claims. Vanity presses and predatory journals are, on the other hand, treated like viXra above, for both failing to conduct proper review, and for their willingness to publishing the work of researchers who are actively avoiding peer review. And, like with viXra above, while it is possible to have good research published in a predatory journal or vanity press, it is unlikely. In those cases Wikipedia errs on the side of caution and does not consider those references to be valid, unless it can be demonstrated that a particular paper or book is recognized as reliable in reliable, independent and secondary sources.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Sewell, Claire. "Perish even if you Publish? The problem of 'predatory' publishers" (PDF). University of Cambridge.
  2. ^ Bogost, Ian (24 November 2008). "Write-Only Publication: IGI Global and Other Vampire Presses". bogost.com.
  3. ^ Weber-Wulff, Debora (31 December 2007). "Write-only publications". Copy, Shake, and Paste.
  4. ^ 't Hooft, Gerard (15 November 2017). "The importance of recognising fringe science" (PDF). Institute for Theoretical Physics, Utrecht University. Retrieved 2017-11-28.
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