A topic in Academic standards and scholarly / scientific values
Academic journals are a core part of 'Academia' and essential to the work of the scholarly community. Publication of a scholar's work is a core part of the scientific/academic enterprise. Research results are generally only taken seriously in the academic community when they are published in peer reviewed journals. (However, in some fields there is an increasing trend to publishing research reports for open community review.)
Read about 'Publishing research'
Read about 'Peer review'
Publication models
Publishing a journal has costs, and these can be considerable when a journal has hard copy (paper copies posted out) as well as an on-line presence. There are three basic ways of paying for this:
Sponsorship:
The cost of a journal might be paid by an organisation wishing to support the work of the journal. The Royal Society of Chemistry sponsors the journal Chemistry Education Research and Practice so that there is no cost to authors, and articles are available freely on the internet. The Springer journal Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research is sponsored by the Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University.
Pay-to-read:
Traditionally most journals charged libraries and individual subscribers (sometimes through association memberships) for volumes of the journal. This allowed decisions about publication to be based purely on merit without asking for money from authors. However, this meant that research supported from public funds would often be behind a 'pay-wall' (i.e., on line but only accessible through payment of a fee or access to a subscription password) and not accessible to tax-paying members of the public without a subscription or affiliation to a subscribing academic library.
Pay-to-publish:
Increasingly, new journals offer all their material open-access on line, and finance this by charging authors (or their institutions or funding sponsors) an article processing charge (APC). A journal that is primarily concerned with providing an academic service will set charges at a level commensurate with actual costs, and may offer reduced charges to authors from countries with lower levels of average income where paying the standard charge would not be viable.
Hybrid models
There are also hybrid models. So a 'pay-to-read' journal may also offer open-access to an author on the payment of a fee, while most material in the journal remains behind a pay-wall.
Read the article 'Challenges to academic publishing from the demand for instant open access to research', published in Chinese Social Sciences Today.
Predatory journals
As publication may be critical to scholars being appointed to academic posts, to obtaining tenure (i.e., permanent employment), to getting promotion, and so forth, academics are usually highly motivated to getting their work published.
Ideally, academics want their work published in the most noticed journals, and welcome critical review of their work to both help them improve it, and to avoid publication of sub-standard work under their name. However, the conditions of academic employment often mean some academics feel that speed of publication, and number of publications, are more important than publication quality.
This creates an environment for setting up journals which are primarily a means to make money for their owners, by seeking to publish articles for an APC, and which offer speedy publication for a fee. These journals may claim to offer peer- and editorial review, but in practice reject very few (if any) submissions, and do not robustly test manuscript quality in peer review and then defer publication until articles are fully revised in accord with expert feedback. Whilst some well-intentioned, newly-established journals are unable to attract sufficiently qualified experts as peer reviewers even though they aspire to quality peer review, predatory journals deliberately prioritise income over article quality.
[I am referring here to research journals. Not all periodicals with a focus on an academic field are intended as research journals: professional magazines and practitioner journals have a different rationale and editorial approach and peer-review is not always seen as necessary in reaching publishing decisions in these types of outlets. (Read more about the distinction between 'Research journals and practitioner journals'.)]
Read more about the characteristics of predatory journals
Citation indices (authentic and padded)
Citation indices or journal impact factors offer an indicator of the impact of a journal that is part of a database of recognised academic journals. It does this by a calculation of how many times, on average, each article in that journal has been cited in articles in the journals in the database over a certain time period (e.g., the previous two years, the previous five years).
Read about Journal impact factors
Some journals advertise a 'citation index' that is calculated in other ways, which is one way of presenting a journal as much more influential and well-established that it really is. This issue can be avoid by checking that any quoted citation index is actually provided by a recognised indexing service, such as that of the 'Web of Science'.
For example, read 'Publish at speed, recant at leisure'
Predatory 'middle-men'
There are also organisations that will promise, for a fee, to place your article in a journal, or to source articles for your journal, in much the fashion that one might put in a order for several crates of tins of baked beans, without any genuine concern for the individual characteristics of each sample of the material.
For example, read 'An invitation from the publishing Mafia?'
The quality of a scholar is measured in terms of the quality of publications
There is nothing inherently wrong with paying a fee (APC, or 'page charges') for publication in a research journal. However, the scholar's mentality should be that they are paying for rigorous peer- and editorial review as well as publication, and a fee is only indicated when that is being provided. Predatory journals work on the principle that you give them money to avoid a serious interrogation of work in peer review as both scholar and journal prioritise publication over the quality of the work. Publications achieved on that basis are not useful to the academic community and only superficially enhance a scholar's curriculum vitae. When subject to a careful inspection, publications seen to be of that kind actually detract from a publications list.
