Disturbance of greedy publishing to academia Taekho You 1,2 , Jinseo Park 3 , June Young Lee 3 , Jinhyuk Yun 2,* , and Woo-Sung Jung 1,4,5,** 1. Department of Industrial and Management Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea 2. School of AI Convergence, Soongsil University, Seoul, Korea 3. Future Technology Analysis Center, Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information, Korea 4. Department of Physics, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea 5. Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics, Korea * jinhyuk.yun@ssu.ac.kr, ** wsjung@postech.ac.kr Abstract Questionable publications have been accused of “greedy” practices; however, their influence on academia has not been gauged. Here, we probe the impact of questionable publications through a systematic and comprehensive analysis with various participants from academia and compare the results with those of their unaccused counterparts using billions of cita- tion records, including liaisons, e.g., journals and publishers, and prosumers, e.g., authors. The analysis reveals that questionable publications embellished their citation scores by at- tributing publisher-level self-citations to their journals while also controlling the journal-level self-citations to circumvent the evaluation of journal-indexing services. This approach makes it difficult to detect malpractice by conventional journal-level metrics. We propose journal- publisher-hybrid metric that help detect malpractice. We also demonstrate that the ques- tionable publications had a weaker disruptiveness and influence than their counterparts. This indicates the negative effect of suspicious publishers in the academia. The findings provide a basis for actionable policy making against questionable publications. 1 Introduction A market is a social system composed of stakeholders engaged in the exchange of commodities. From this perspective, academia is also a marketplace comprising of scholars, journals and pub- lishers, institutions, funding agencies, etc. Based on the roles of these entities—notably journals and scholars—academia can be classified into two broad business models: subscription-based and open access (OA). In both models, scholars have their research outcomes published in journals. The difference between the two models boils down to the party liable for article processing. The subscription-based model charges the readers, e.g. libraries, governments, institutions, and schol- ars, and limits the readership to a few solvent scholars and institutions. In contrast, the OA model allows everyone to access the full paper without payment; instead, they bill the authors an article processing charge (APC) [1, 2]. With the Internet revolution, the OA model has gradually been accepted by academia. In the initial days of OA, scholars opined that the movement would enable them to give back to the society, and consequently benefit academia and catalyse scientific literacy and advancement. However, while this vision has partially materialised, the rise of a clandestine segment of the OA model that promotes publications of questionable standards with the sole purpose of profiteering has been observed worldwide [3, 4, 5]. Questionable journals (QJs) and questionable publish- ers (QPs) infiltrate academia with a perfunctory peer-review process by exploiting the weakness of the evaluation system, i.e., its reliance on journal indices. For instance, increasing academic competition has forced scholars to have more research published in indexed journals with high vis- ibility, e.g., science citation index (expanded), social science citation index, and Scopus, etc. QJs arXiv:2106.15166v2 [cs.DL] 6 Jul 2021