During summer I bookmarked “10 Tips on Identifying Preatory Journals and Conferences” at https://www.enago.com/academy/top-10-handy-e-tools-for-researchers/ Enago recommends to avoid 1) journals with low ranking; large conferences with 2) generic topics and/or/ 3) combining different fields 4) invitations form free email accounts, 5) unknown speakers and/or unclear agendas 6) promises for short peer review procedures
and to check the background and history 7) of a journal 8) of the reviewers 9) the organisers of the conferences - and of course to visit finally their homepage
I’ve compared them what we summariset in our guidelines on publication strategies: knowing your community, journals and main conferences is part of the planning - we additionally added the following questions:
• What do I know about the conference, journal or publisher at hand?
• Are they searchable in a reliable database, an open access journal list or the library?
• What is known about the editoral board? Who are the contact persons?
• Who has attended the conference or published in this journal before? What is the quality of these publications?
• Did I receive an email that looks like it has been randomly distributed?
• Whom may I ask for further advice, e.g. at my university, my supervisor, my colleagues?
How are you dealing with these issues?
Do you have experiences or advice ot share on this topic?