
Frontiers news
22 Jun 2023
Predatoryreports.org: An open letter from Frontiers’ chief executive editor
To our community, In March of this year, we alerted you to the emergence of predatoryreports[.]org. This website and its authors, whose motives are unknown, deliberately seek to undermine our organization, our community, and the open access movement by disseminating false information about Frontiers. At the risk of feeding the egos of the anonymous and irresponsible people behind predatoryreports.org with this second public acknowledgement, I report here on how we are seeking to address this issue. As responsibly asserted by the Committee of Publication Ethics in April, ‘authors and institutions should treat lists of predatory (or fake) journals with the same degree of scrutiny as they do with the journals themselves. Lists that are not transparent about criteria used should not be relied on.’ Researchers and institutions have valid questions about the quality, impact, and motives of their publishers. Predatoryreports[.]org attempts to undermine any constructive discussion by sloppily promulgating “the p-word”; unfortunately, this unethical behavior is being noticed, creating concern and bewilderment. The p-word is a blanket derogatory term that is so easy to use that it blocks scientific, critical, and common-sense thought processes. Some employ it liberally to create a smokescreen, in the hope that no one will feel […]