Predatory open-access publishing in critical care medicine.

Purpose: To evaluate the characteristics and practice of predatory journals in critical care medicine (CCM).

Methods: We checked a freely accessible online and constantly updated version of the Beall lists of potential predatory publishers/journals in the field of CCM. We checked the journals' websites to retrieve the following data such as: 1) Country and address (checked by Google maps); 2) Article processing charges (APC); 3) Indexing; 4) Editor-in-chief and the Editorial Board (EB) members; 5) Number of published articles; 6) Review time (lapse submission-acceptance); 7) English form.

Results: We identified 86 CCM journals from 48 publishers. Most journals' reported address was in the US (52%). The address was unreliable in 43%. English form was low/very-low in 72% of cases. Three journals were indexed in PubMed. Several journals reported false indexing in the Committee on publication ethics (COPE), International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Google Scholar. Median APCs for research article was 909.5 USD. Name of the Editor-in-chief and EB lists were reported by 29% and 81%, respectively. Median lapse submission-acceptance for published articles was 32 days.

Conclusions: We found a relevant number of probable predatory CCM journals. Scientists should carefully check journal's characteristics to avoid selecting predatory journals as editorial target.