Predatory publications- A curse for the scholarly open access publishing

Research published during the last decades has shown that there is immense growth in the number of fake publishers and predatory journals. There is misconception about the Open Access (OA) publishing and often is compared with predatory publishing, whereas open access resources are qualitative and free for multipurpose usage and reuse. A severe threat is being posed by the predatory publishing to science and its credibility through avoiding or faking the peer review process, pollution of scholarly literature with junk articles and through commercial interests. This research paper throws light on the concept of the predatory publications, criteria for identifying the predatory journals, librarian's role and has suggested some preventive measures to avoid such journals.