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Introduction
The aim of this paper is to report on a study undertaken by CREST (Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology) to estimate the extent of predatory publishing amongst South African academics. A few South African studies and reports have appeared in recent years which have suggested that predatory publishing is not only present but is in fact becoming more pervasive - at least in some disciplines.1'2 However, no study has been done that presents a systematic assessment of how many articles, authored by South African academics, have been published in predatory journals.
There has been a surge of interest in predatory publishing and its effects in recent years, with two kinds of 'studies' emerging. The first are scholarly publications that analyse the nature and dynamics of predatory publishing. Included in this category are studies by Bohannon3, Bowman4, Djuric5, Gasparyan et al.6, Jalalian and Mahboobi7, Kozak et al.8, Nelson and Huffman9, Shen10, Sipka11, Svab and Makivic12, Tin et al.13 and Xia et al.14'15 Arguably the most comprehensive of these is a report in 2012 by Truth16 entitled 'Pay big to publish fast: Academic journal rackets'.
The second category of articles on predatory publishing is editorials and commentaries in journals which are more polemical and critical in nature. Articles of this...