Predatory scholarly publishing - A threat for science communication. Training program for PhD students

Predatory scholarly publishing - A threat for science communication. Training program for PhD students

Poster

Savina Kirilova
Faculty of chemistry and pharmacy, University of Sofia “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

The current generation of scientific authors has ample opportunities for publicizing their research. Open access journal publishing has experienced a drastic growth in the past decades and significantly reshaped the landscape of scholarly communication. Numerous illegitimate or predatory journals have emerged in most fields of science. Most of them are published in developing countries, particularly India and Pakistan. By exploiting gold Open Access publishing, these journals paved the way for low-quality articles that threatened the validity of science. Some of these frauds are unknown to researchers because of the lack of detailed research the types of cybercrime in the academic world. Therefore, all stakeholders of science communication should be aware of multiple facets of unethical practices and publish well-checked and evidence-based articles. Moreover, a study was conducted by the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy of Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski ", Bulgaria. It is related with determination whether the academic community is aware of the risks in modern science. The obtained data clearly show insufficient knowledge of fake science and the need to organize a training courses related to the topic. As a result, a course on "Publishing new scientific results - why, where and how? Elements of publishing ethics - a PhD course for Chemists" has been developed in the Faculty. It introduces to the PhD students, Post-doctoral students and young scientists the principles of successful scientific publishing, the scientific metrics for assessing the impact of scientific publications and the features of marginal scientific publications.
Key words: open access ; science communication ; predatory scholarly publishing