Many questionable open access and print journals send invitations to publish in future issues or serve on editorial boards. Before submitting an article or agreeing to a seat on an editorial board, investigate the reputation and legitimacy of the journal.

Fortunately, opportunistic journals are detectable.

Steps to Determine Whether a Journal or Publisher is Predatory:

1. Visit the journal's website. Some publishers' websites appear professionally created and managed, however closer inspection may reveal poor design, typographical errors, and grammatical errors that would not appear on a reputable publisher's site. Be cautious of those that provide only web contact forms.
    
2. Review the journal's scope as described on the website. Most questionable journals have scopes so broad that they will publish articles on nearly any topic.
    
3.  Check if the journal is indexed in subject specific library databases by a major journal abstracter / indexer.  Is the journal indexed in your discipline's major article databases? For example, if you are looking to publish a sociology article, see if the journal is indexed in Sociological Abstracts.  See if the journal is indexed in multi-disciplinary databases such as Web of Science/Institute for Scientific Information or PubMed.   Look up the journal title in Ulrichsweb Serial Directory available from the Library Databases to gain additional information about the journal. 
    
4. Find out whether the journal is a member of an industry association that vets its members, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (www.oaspa.org).
    
5. See if the journal has a reputation for being predatory: Check if the journal is listed in Cabell's Blacklist of Predatory Publishers and/or on the archived Jeff Beall's List of Predatory Journals [See note on these lists in right box]
    
6. Scan the journal's table of contents and editorial board list:  Do you recognize any of the published authors or members of the board?  Are any of the board members senior scholars in the field? Are they all junior members or unknowns in the field?  What are their affiliated institutions?   Do the board members list their participation with the journal on their CVs or web-bios at their institutions?  Finally, you can contact board members or authors and ask about their experience with the journal or publisher.
    
7. Examine articles that appear in the journal and judge their caliber. Predatory publishers are not interested in producing journal articles that demonstrate excellent research or that offer compelling arguments, and often lack scholarly screening or quality control.
    
8. Check the journal's policies. Examine the publication’s peer-review process, author fees, and policies pertaining to self-archiving, access, and conflicts of interest. All should be clearly outlined on the journal’s website.  Unscrupulous publishers may also promise a quick peer-review turnaround. Considering the peer-review process used by reputable journals can take months, a publisher that states their peer-review system takes as little as 21 days is either rushing the process or not doing any peer-review at all.
    
9. Check for the author's publication fee schedule. If it does not appear on the website or if the publisher states it will notify authors of the fee after their papers are accepted for publication, the publisher is likely charging excessively high author fees. Legitimate journal publishers make this information easy to find on their website.
    
10. Be wary of vague “Contact us.”   If the journal offers only a "contact us' form without any editorial staff phone or email contact information be concerned.
     
11. Be suspicious of e-mail invitations to submit to journals or to become editorial board members. “If you get an invitation through email, be extremely suspicious,” says Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado Denver. “Most high-quality journals don’t go looking for editorial boards through email.”