Awareness on Predatory Practices

Predatory academy practices (PAPs) put self-interest or motives and undermines the scholarly contribution to the society. These practices are observed in the form of journals or conferences that solicit articles from the researchers and provide a platform to disseminate research findings without appropriate or any peer review. PAPs not only risks circulation of false information affecting decision and policy making but also risk losing trust from the people from research. Some researchers might even use PAPs to meet the evaluation criteria to attain certain position whereas some other researchers might become the victim of such practices unknowingly under the publishing pressure that will have long term impact on their career. Awareness about such practices among researchers, local publishers, and policy makers is the most important step to discourage such practices and prevent researcher from falling victim to PAPs.

Research Ethics Working Group of NaYAN through its program “Increasing Awareness of Predatory Academic Practices” aims to raise awareness among researchers, policy makers, publishers, and editors about predatory academic practices. The program was supported by InterAcademy Partnership (IAP). IAP has recently published a long report on "combating predatory academic journals and conferences".

Following activities were implemented during the project period.

Online survey among researchers

An online questionnaire survey about PAPs was conducted, starting from 27th January and ending on 31 March and had 356 responses from Nepal, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Executive summary of the survey report is available HERE. Full report of the survey will be shared in the form of journal article when it is available.

Stakeholders discussion

A discussion was held with researchers, students, journal publishers and editors from major research institutions and universities in Nepal was the first event caried out. The discussion brought out issues related to research and publication practices and efforts taken by the institutions regarding predatory academic practices (PAPs) mostly predatory journals. Notes from the discussion is available HERE.

focus Group discussions

NaYAN also organized a series of group discussions in different educational and research institutes starting from 11th February to 2nd March, 2022 with around 150 participants altogether. The discussions very helpful to ignite curiosity among students after hearing faculties and researchers sharing their experience regarding PAPs and bring out underlying problems in the academia system in Nepal.

Workshop on predatory practices

A hybrid model workshop was organized from 25-26th March in Pokhara University, Pokhara (physical) and Zoom (virtual). Altogether 465 individuals had registered for the workshop. The workshop included lectures, group discussion, homework, presentation, and report writing. A total of 65 participants participated physically and 120 joined virtually representing four countries.

Review of policy documents & guidelines

We reviewed documents of different institutions of Nepal to see if they included any provisions related to PAPs. These documents included faculty recruitment and promotion policies, student enrollment guidelines of major universities and research institutes of Nepal. This document is under preparation as a journal article. We will share when it is accepted for publication.

Author’s guideline

A two-pager guideline targeted for early career researchers. This guideline is expected to help the authors avoid predatory journals and conferences. It is currently going copy editing and will be shared when final copy is available.