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Italian researchers using ‘predatory publishers’

About 5 per cent of Italian researchers seeking promotion have published in so-called “predatory journals” that have questionable standards of rigour, an analysis has found.

Researchers at Aalto University in Finland and the University of Pisa in Italy examined the publications of 46,000-plus researchers who sought promotion through the first wave of Italy’s national-level evalutation known as the National Scientific Qualification (Abilitazione scientifica nazionale, ASN), which was carried out between 2012 and 2014.

The analysis found that about 5 per cent of the journal articles these researchers published in the 10 years before their application appeared in open-access journals that the analysis classed as predatory. This totalled almost 6,000 articles, it found, with a total publication cost potentially totalling millions of euros.

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