Pedagogical strategy for scholarly communication literacy and avoiding deceptive publishing practices

Abstract

Informing and supporting researchers’ understanding of the challenges of scholarly communication, particularly how to avoid deceptive publishing practices, remains a challenge for the academic community and its stakeholders. Over the past decade, this community has developed various strategies to assist its members in addressing this issue. However, these measures do not seem to be sufficient, and many researchers, particularly younger and less experienced ones, continue to fall prey to predatory publications. This article presents a series of workshops on scholarly communication literacy as a pedagogical strategy to raise awareness and to prevent novice researchers from falling victim to the challenges of scholarly communication and unethical publishing practices. Most participants perceived these training workshops as an effective educational approach. The results of these educational seminars demonstrate that this type of pedagogical strategy that consists of training, awareness-raising, and prevention approaches is a key factor to informing and warning novice researchers about scholarly communication pitfalls and deceptive publishing practices.