Cuestiones Éticas en la Voracidad Editorial

The emergence of open access scientific journals was a first step to the emergence of predatory publishing. The initial interest in easing free access online to scientific publications led to the emergence of companies that promote pay for publishing (gold open access) to justify free access to their contents. These companies eventually modify their objectives from free access to knowledge to economic benefit. This way, they developed propaganda strategies to capture authors and to offer them possible benefits in curricular prestige such easy publishing or collaborations as a reviewer or as a member of the editorial committee. These strategies deceived many professionals who received these invitations when they understood that the purpose was not scientific but economic but for many others were a alternative way to improve their prestige. This strategy has modified the scene of scientific publications because pay for publishing minimizes the quality control of published papers. To avoid the damages caused by this predatory publishing, it may be appropriate to redefine the scenario of open access journals that require a publication fee, and it could be adequate at that open access authors include as a conflict of interest the cost of publishing and the origin of their financial support, and a specific appendix should be included s well in curricula including both the articles published in open access journals and any editorial merit associated to journals that require publication fees.