Abstract:
Open Access (OA) is a model for publishing scholarly peer-reviewed journals,
and articles can be freely read, as the publishing is funded through the Article Pro cessing Charges (APC) other than subscription. The development of open access
publishing created a pathway for predatory publishing, which is an exploitive
profit-making academic business, charging publication fees from authors without
providing quality editorial service. The issue becomes a serious problem for the
researchers to differentiate a legitimate publication from a predatory publication.
This article aims to measure the awareness of predatory open-access journals among
academics. The population of the study was permanent academic staff members
attached to the Faculty of Management and Business Studies, University of Jaffna.
There was a total of 52 academic staff members, so there was no sampling; all staff
members were included in the study. A pretested online questionnaire was circulated
among academics from the Faculty of Management and Business Studies, Univer sity of Jaffna. Among the total(n=52) population, 67.3% of the staff responded to
the questionnaire. The results of this study revealed that 22.85% of the staff were
fully knowledgeable about the open-access system, 40% knowledgeable, 25.71%
somewhat knowledgeable, and 11.42% slightly knowledgeable. Faculty members
prioritized the listed factors considered during the journal selection, such as duration
of the publication process, impact factor, the peer review process, quality of the
editorial board, publication costs, editorial support, and journal indexing. Weight
score calculated based on the preference level and Journal indexing (209) was highly
prioritized by the respondents, followed by the impact factor (179), publication cost
(177), and peer review process (168) in journal selection. Nearly 70% of the study
participants know about predatory publishing, and 28.5% of the respondents may
have heard about it, but they were not sure about predatory publications. Among
the respondents, all were aware of at least any systems to differentiate the predatory
journal from the legitimate journal. The study suggests that there is a need to conduct
more awareness programs to educate the predatory open-access publications to the
academic staff members of the Faculty of Management and Business Studies of the
University of Jaffna.
