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It is no longer possible to address Gold Open Access journals without the phenomenon of predatory journals [COB 18] being included in the debate. Designated as such by Jeffrey Beall’s blog in 2012¹⁰, predatory journals are part of the collateral damages resulting from the development of the Gold Author-Pays model. One of the major characteristics of the phenomenon is that these journals use the Gold Open Access model and solicit authors, asking them to submit articles that they publish on their site without any form of peer review. A predatory journal therefore simply cashes in on the APCs without adding any value – notably scientific (no peer review process) – or any editorial improvement to the manuscript. A recent article proposes a definition that is already a collectively accepted reference [GRU 19]:

Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices.

The phenomenon, which was in its infancy in the early 2010s, has grown to an estimated 14,000 predatory journals¹¹. They present a significant risk to the field of Health, more so than for any other field. The largest number of these “predatory offers” occurs in the field of Health [GRU 19]. Predatory journals within this field therefore add to the phenomenon of Fake Science [HOP 19] and contribute to the complex, nebulous and dubious world of bio-medical information on the Web. The community of health researchers is aware of the danger this represents and is mobilized to denounce it. The extensive literature on the subject, published in medical journals, bears witness to this [CAM 18].

The most recent research on this new subject reveals that Open Access might be a mechanism by which external actors penetrate and gain a foothold in the scientific communication and publishing scene, and build legitimacy [COB 18; SIL 20]. They also highlight the capacity of Open Access to implement hybridization and thus increase the complexity of publication models, whose intelligibility contributes to the reliability of the information they convey [DIL 18].