The Market for Lemons: How predatory journals make a new quality journal unsustainable for business?






Nobel prize winner George Akerlof described how the quality of goods is degraded due to information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only “lemons” behind. Lemon is a vehicle with several manufacturing defects that buyers don’t know while buying.





The mechanism:





Suppose buyers can’t distinguish between a “peach” (high-quality car) and a “lemon”. A dishonest seller can sell the “lemon” saying it as “peach” at a price that is the average value of lemon and peach. So, in the market of lemon and peach, selling lemon will continue and sellers holding peaches will start leaving the market (as buyers can’t distinguish between lemon and peach, and lemon will have a lower price than that of peach). It produces a positive feedback loop because, when enough sellers of peaches leave the market, willingness to pay for buyers will decrease (as the average quality of cars on market decreased) leading to even more sellers of peach to leave the market.





Due to lemons, or predatory journals, new journals are seen in the eyes of doubt. Many started relying on unscientific, non-transparent birds-eye reviews run by individuals like Beall’s List, which has the potentiality to kill any new journal without any proper and valid reasons for listing. Even govt policies that are meant to tackle bad publishing like funding research only if author articles are indexed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) make a new journal unstainable which leads to only monopolistic publishers thrive.





It requires an average of about 5 years to get indexed in JCR and it requires lots of resources for it. But no one likes to publish their research in a non-indexed journal which makes a new journal too hard to sustain and nurture.





Dear scientists, you are scientists and are supposed to make decisions on the purview of scientific arguments. We at mercury reaudito will provide a complete open peer review that will be published with the article. The review is done with rigorous scientific guidelines or review criteria to follow.





I hope you will put such arguments in front of governments so that they give a new good journal a fair chance to thrive, otherwise, publishing will only be in the hand of a few oligopoly markets.


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