# The Evolving Ecosystem of Predatory Journals: A Case Study in Indian Perspective

## TL;DR

This paper investigates the evolving landscape of predatory journals in India using data-driven methods, revealing their similarities to reputable publishers and proposing new signals for identification.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel data-driven approach that combines standard and network-based signals to analyze and understand the evolution of predatory publishers.

## Key findings

- Predatory publishers closely resemble reputable publishers.
- Network-centric signals can help identify predatory publishers.
- The ecosystem of predatory journals is highly volatile and adaptive.

## Abstract

Digital advancement in scholarly repositories has led to the emergence of a large number of open access predatory publishers that charge high article processing fees from authors but fail to provide necessary editorial and publishing services. Identifying and blacklisting such publishers has remained a research challenge due to the highly volatile scholarly publishing ecosystem. This paper presents a data-driven approach to study how potential predatory publishers are evolving and bypassing several regularity constraints. We empirically show the close resemblance of predatory publishers against reputed publishing groups. In addition to verifying standard constraints, we also propose distinctive signals gathered from network-centric properties to understand this evolving ecosystem better.