Predatory Journal Statistics 2026: Scale, APC Scams, and Who Is Most at Risk

Predatory journal statistics paint a stark picture of a publishing ecosystem under sustained attack. As of February 2026, Cabells’ Predatory Reports database has surpassed 20,274 flagged journal titles — more than triple the count at the database’s launch in 2017. Researchers in every discipline and at every career stage are receiving unsolicited solicitation emails daily, often from outlets that charge hundreds of dollars in article processing charges (APCs) while delivering no meaningful peer review. Understanding the quantitative scale of this problem is the first step toward protecting your own publication record.

The issue is not limited to fringe outlets. Predatory journals have been found indexed in major databases including Scopus, and at least one publisher — OMICS International — was ordered by a US federal court to pay $50.1 million in damages for defrauding researchers. Yet surveys consistently show that a significant share of the global research community remains unaware of the risk or unable to reliably identify problematic outlets before submitting work.

This data roundup draws on peer-reviewed studies, the Cabells database, the Shen & Björk longitudinal analysis, and the FTC enforcement record to give you the most complete picture of predatory publishing in 2026 — from raw journal counts and article volumes to the geographic patterns that make certain author populations especially vulnerable.

Key Findings at a Glance

Video: Publishing your research? How to avoid predatory journals — The Royal Society (2024)

The table below aggregates the most frequently cited data points on predatory publishing from verified sources. All figures are drawn from specific studies or databases referenced throughout this article.

Database Growth: From Beall’s List to 20,000+ Titles

The modern effort to catalogue predatory journals began with librarian Jeffrey Beall, who coined the term “predatory publishing” around 2010 and maintained an informal list of suspect publishers and journals until January 2017 when he took it offline under reported pressure. The list’s discontinuation left a gap that commercial and academic alternatives have since attempted to fill.

Cabells, an academic intelligence firm, launched its Predatory Reports database in 2017 with approximately 7,000 titles, using a documented set of over 60 behavioural criteria to flag journals. The database has grown continuously:

Cabells noted in its February 2026 announcement that the rate of growth has moderated somewhat compared to earlier years — a change the organisation attributes partly to backend workflow improvements in journal evaluation, rather than a slowdown in predatory publishing activity itself. The 20,000-title milestone is widely interpreted as a lower-bound estimate: many problematic titles operate below the radar of any watchlist, particularly new journals that have not yet been reviewed.

It is worth noting an important limitation of these counts. Database figures reflect journals that have been identified and reviewed; they do not represent the full universe of predatory titles. The Shen & Björk 2015 study estimated approximately 8,000 journals as of 2014 using a sampling methodology from Beall’s list, while Cabells’ disciplined evaluation process now exceeds that figure by more than 2.5 times — suggesting both that the problem has grown and that earlier estimates were conservative.

Article Volumes and Publication Rates

The most cited estimate of predatory publishing volume comes from Shen & Björk’s 2015 longitudinal study published in BMC Medicine. Drawing on a stratified sample of 613 journals from Beall’s list, the researchers estimated that approximately 420,000 articles were published in predatory open access journals in 2014 — a figure that represented roughly an 800% increase from an estimated 53,000 articles published in 2010.

The same study estimated that these journals generated approximately $75 million in total APC revenue in 2014 — a figure derived from the combination of per-article fees and article volumes across the sample. The researchers themselves described their results as a “rough estimate” given the difficulty of obtaining comprehensive data from journals with limited transparency.

Since Shen & Björk, no peer-reviewed study has published a comprehensive updated article-count estimate with equivalent methodology. However, several proxy indicators suggest volume has continued rising since 2014:

• The number of flagged journal titles has nearly tripled since 2017 (Cabells data).
• Submissions to predatory journals are reported to be rising, with AI-assisted writing tools lowering the friction of producing manuscripts for unethical submission (Cabells, 2026).
• The number of peer-reviewed research papers on predatory journals published in PubMed reached approximately 89 in 2024 alone — an indicator of the field’s growing academic attention.
• The OMICS International case revealed that the publisher alone processed approximately 69,000 manuscripts between 2011 and 2017, of which the FTC found only around half were ever sent for peer review.

For context on where predatory output sits relative to legitimate publishing, see the broader academic publishing statistics for 2026, which estimates global article output at over 5 million papers per year. Even at the 2014 baseline figure of 420,000 predatory articles, that would represent roughly 8% of total scholarly output — a non-trivial contamination rate.

The fake peer review practices that predatory journals rely on are the same mechanisms driving an explosion of retractions across legitimate journals. Our comprehensive research paper retraction statistics for 2026 documents how the 63,000+ retractions now logged globally connect back to predatory publisher operations and paper mill networks.

APC Costs and Revenue: The Financial Anatomy of Predatory Publishing

A defining characteristic of predatory journals is their use of article processing charges (APCs) as a revenue mechanism, often without delivering the peer review or editorial services that legitimate open-access journals provide in exchange for those fees. The financial footprint of this practice has been documented in several ways.

What Authors Actually Pay

A 2019 survey study published in JMIR (Richtig et al.) of biomedical authors who had published in predatory journals found a median APC of US $190 (interquartile range $0–520). This is substantially lower than the global average APC for legitimate open access journals, which research has placed at approximately $1,626. The lower median in predatory journals is consistent with the sector’s strategy of using low fees to attract price-sensitive researchers, particularly those in developing economies operating on limited research budgets.

Notably, the same survey found that 15% of authors cited affordability as their explicit reason for choosing the journal — a figure that illustrates how the combination of low APCs and publish-or-perish pressure drives researchers toward predatory outlets.

For comparison, the open access APC cost data for 2026 shows legitimate hybrid OA journals charging an average of $2,500–$3,000, with gold OA journals averaging around $1,626. Predatory journals’ typical median fee of under $200 represents a significant undercut — but the cost of publishing in one, in terms of reputational and career damage, vastly exceeds any fee savings.

Sector-Level Revenue

The scale of financial fraud in this space is illustrated most starkly by enforcement actions. In April 2019, a US federal court ordered OMICS International and its parent entities to pay $50.1 million in damages following an FTC lawsuit — the first federal enforcement action against a predatory publisher. The judgment represented the company’s total revenues from 2011 to 2017, net of chargebacks and refunds. OMICS operated over 700 journals at its peak and was found to have hidden publication fees from authors until after manuscript submission, then refusing to allow withdrawal.

Shen & Björk’s 2015 estimate of $75 million in total predatory APC revenue for 2014 across the entire sector gives a sense of the industry’s aggregate financial scale even at that relatively early stage of its development.

Regional and Disciplinary Patterns

Predatory publishing is a global phenomenon, but its effects are distributed unevenly across geographies and disciplines. The Shen & Björk (2015) study included geographic analysis based on a sample of 47 journals and found that authors were heavily concentrated in Asia and Africa.

Country-Level Data (2014 Sample)

A Scopus-based analysis identified that in certain countries — notably Kazakhstan and Indonesia — predatory journal articles represented approximately 17% of total national research output during the periods studied. This level of contamination has significant implications for national research evaluation systems and for how citation metrics from those countries should be interpreted.

Disciplinary Distribution

Analysis of Beall’s list and similar resources indicates that engineering and medicine represent the two disciplines with the highest absolute volume of predatory journal publications. One analysis found engineering accounting for over 93,000 publications in suspect journals across a multi-year observation window. The Cabells database spans 18 disciplines, reflecting the broad sectoral spread of the problem rather than its concentration in any single field.

The biomedical sciences attract particular attention partly because of patient-safety implications: a predatory pharmacology study that reaches clinical practice without genuine peer review carries real-world risk that a predatory publication in a humanities field does not.

Researcher Awareness and Vulnerability

One of the most striking findings from survey-based research is how widespread exposure to predatory journals is, even among researchers who consider themselves well-informed about publication ethics.

A 2022 global survey published in Learned Publishing, drawing on responses from researchers across 112 countries and all disciplines and career stages, found that approximately 22% of respondents indicated that they had either published in a predatory journal, participated in a predatory conference, or could not confirm whether they had done so. A closely aligned figure appears in another 2022 analysis, which placed the proportion at nearly one in four researchers globally.

The Richtig et al. (2019) survey of biomedical authors who had published in journals later identified as predatory produced several additional data points of note:

• 73.8% of authors were unaware of Beall’s list at the time of submission.
• 33.0% described themselves as somewhat familiar with predatory journals generally — compared to 77% of editors surveyed.
• 30.1% believed, in retrospect, that they had published in a predatory journal.
• 87.9% stated they would avoid the same journal if given the definition of predatory publishing.
• 21.8% confirmed their article had not been sent for peer review at all.
• 38.6% reported an interval of just 16–30 days between submission and acceptance — a hallmark of absent or minimal peer review.

Across all career stages, the vulnerability is broadly uniform. The 2022 survey data found that early-, mid-, and advanced-career researchers were equally susceptible to publishing in predatory outlets. This challenges the assumption that awareness grows automatically with seniority — the pressure to publish applies throughout careers, as does the volume of spam solicitation.

Among those who submitted knowingly, career advancement pressure was the most commonly cited motivation. Among those who submitted unknowingly, lack of awareness was the dominant factor. Both pathways represent systemic risks rather than individual failures.

The acceptance timelines that predatory journals offer — 16 to 30 days versus the typical 60–200 days documented for legitimate journals — are themselves a warning signal. Peer review timelines for legitimate outlets are covered in depth in our journal peer review time statistics for 2026, which provides the comparative benchmarks researchers need to assess whether a journal’s timeline is credible.

Detection Tools and Their Limitations

Several tools and resources exist to help researchers evaluate journals before submitting:

The checklist approach underpinning Think. Check. Submit. is backed by COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) and is designed to give researchers a structured framework for evaluating journals across indicators such as clear ownership information, editorial board transparency, indexing status, and peer review process description. Its primary limitation is that predatory publishers have become increasingly sophisticated at mimicking the surface features of legitimate journals — professional-looking websites, fabricated editorial boards, and claimed (but unverifiable) indexing status.

The Scopus vulnerability deserves particular attention. A 2023 study found that 41 hijacked journals — legitimate journal titles whose online presence had been cloned by fraudulent operators — were still present in Scopus data as of September 2023. This means that an article’s appearance in a Scopus-indexed journal is a necessary but not sufficient condition for quality assurance. Understanding how citations are counted and what they represent is a related competency for any researcher navigating the publication landscape.

For guidance on crafting a submission that stands out to legitimate peer reviewers and editors, see our step-by-step guide on how to write a journal submission cover letter in 2026.

Academic Consequences and Retractions

Publishing in a predatory journal carries cascading professional and scientific risks that extend well beyond the initial APC payment.

Career and Credibility Risk

Most institutions in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia explicitly exclude publications in non-indexed or predatory journals from research assessment exercises. In the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), only outputs from journals meeting defined quality thresholds are eligible for submission. A researcher who builds a publication record substantially in predatory outlets risks having that record discounted in hiring, promotion, and grant evaluation processes.

Retraction Record

A 2022 analysis drawing on the Retraction Watch database found that only 46 potentially predatory journals — including 18 indexed in Web of Science — had formally retracted a total of 645 publications. This is almost certainly a significant undercount. Predatory journals have little institutional incentive to issue retractions; the same research found that retraction handling by such journals falls far below the standards articulated by COPE’s retraction guidelines.

AI and the Near-Term Outlook

The introduction of AI writing tools has accelerated the supply side of the predatory publishing ecosystem. Cabells noted in early 2026 that AI technology is enabling some researchers to produce more manuscripts more rapidly, which in turn fuels demand for fast-turnaround publication outlets — exactly the market predatory journals serve. The data on AI detection accuracy in 2026 illustrates the parallel challenge: tools designed to flag AI-generated content in academic work are still imperfect, meaning the intersection of AI-generated papers and predatory journals presents a compound quality-control problem for the research community.

For students preparing their first publications — whether from a thesis chapter or a supervised research project — the key lesson from all available data is that due diligence before submission is non-negotiable. Tools like Tesify — Write Your Thesis with AI can help researchers structure rigorous work from the outset, but the publication venue decision remains a critical independent step requiring active verification against resources like Cabells and Think. Check. Submit.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

1. Cabells. (2026, February 4). 20,000 Reasons to Love Predatory Reports. blog.cabells.com
2. Shen, C., & Björk, B.-C. (2015). ‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics. BMC Medicine, 13(1), 230. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26423063
3. Richtig, G., Berger, M., Lange-Asschenfeldt, B., Aberer, W., & Richtig, E. (2019). Perspectives From Authors and Editors in the Biomedical Disciplines on Predatory Journals: Survey Study. JMIR. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6743260
4. US Federal Trade Commission. (2019). Court Rules in FTC’s Favor Against Predatory Academic Publisher OMICS Group. ftc.gov
5. Research Information. (2025). Predatory Publishing in 2025. researchinformation.info
6. Inside Higher Ed. (2015). Study Finds Huge Increase in Articles Published by ‘Predatory’ Journals. insidehighered.com