Predatory Publishing

Here is a template for corresponding with a predatory journal’s editor to request for article withdrawal.
The template may be adapted as needed to suit your circumstances. You and your co-authors are advised to save copies of all your correspondence with the predatory journal.

            Dear EDITOR’S NAME

I am the first / corresponding author on the manuscript [title] (Reference Number: [number]) submitted to the journal [name of journal].  I am contacting you requesting that you withdraw my manuscript, remove it from your server immediately, and never publish it in the future.

I and my co-authors hold the copyright to this work. None of us have transferred our copyright to [name of publisher], nor have we signed a publication agreement that gives you a license to publish our work. Therefore, should you publish our work you will be in violation of our copyright.

I have no intention of paying a withdrawal or publication fee, and I have no means or mechanisms in which to do so. You do not have the legal authority to post my manuscript on your site. I am again requesting that you withdraw my manuscript from your servers immediately and never publish it in the future.

I expect you to follow up with me via email with your explicit acknowledgement of this request. If my work remains on your site, I will find it necessary to enforce my request through additional means.

            Sincerely,

            YOUR NAME

Source: https://uark.libguides.com/WritingPublishing/Predatory

Bohannon, J. (2013). Who’s afraid of peer review. Science, 342(6154).

Moher, D., & Srivastava, A. (2015). You are invited to submit…. BMC Medicine, 13(1), 180.

Shen, C., & Björk, B. C. (2015). ‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics. BMC Medicine, 13(1), 230.

Xia, J., Harmon, J. L., Connolly, K. G., Donnelly, R. M., Anderson, M. R., & Howard, H. A. (2015). Who publishes in “predatory” journals?. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(7), 1406-1417.

Beall, J. (2013). Predatory publishing is just one of the consequences of gold open access. Learned Publishing, 26(2), 79-84.

Beall, J. (2017). What I learned from predatory publishers. Biochemia Medica, 27(2), 273-278.

Beall, J. (2016). Best practices for scholarly authors in the age of predatory journals. The Annals of The Royal College of Surgeons of England, 98(2), 77-79.

Beall, J. (2016). Dangerous predatory publishers threaten medical research. Journal of Korean Medical Science, 31(10), 1511-1513.

Clark, J., & Smith, R. (2015). Firm action needed on predatory journals. BMJ. 350:h210.