For researchers · Journal safety

Is this invitation worth answering?

Predatory publishers target scholars under pressure to publish, and the approach almost always arrives the same way: an email, addressed to you as an esteemed expert, promising speed, and claiming an index. Paste it here and see the known warning signs named and explained.

Paste the email, or the journal's own page

An invitation, a call for papers, or the text of a journal's “about” or fees page. Longer is better — the signals sit in the small print.

The text

🔒 Nothing leaves your browser. This check runs entirely on your device — the text is not uploaded, not stored, and not sent to us or to anyone else. There is no account and no cost.

The check no tool can do for you

The scan above reads wording. It cannot tell you whether a journal is real, and neither can anyone who tells you from memory — indexing changes, titles are added and discontinued. Verify at the source, and verify the title exactly as written, because look-alike names are the whole trick.

Is it actually in Scopus? Search the title at Scopus Sources. Elsevier also publishes a list of titles it has discontinued for quality reasons — a journal can have been indexed once and not be now, which is what an old certificate on a website is hiding.
Open access? Look it up in DOAJ. Not being listed is not proof of anything on its own, but a legitimate open-access journal usually is.
Does the ISSN resolve, to this name? Check at the ISSN Portal. A borrowed or invented ISSN is common and takes thirty seconds to catch.
Walk the four steps at Think. Check. Submit. — the checklist the publishing community itself points people to.
Email one person on the editorial board, at their university address, and ask whether they are on it. Boards are listed without consent more often than people expect, and the reply tells you everything.
Ask your own librarian or research office. They have seen the same invitation, usually this month, and in India many institutions maintain their own approved list.

⚠ Money is the point at which this stops being recoverable. An article processing charge is normal in open access — but it is disclosed up front, and it falls due after peer review and acceptance, never as a condition of submission. Once a fee is paid to a predatory publisher it is not coming back, and the paper cannot then be submitted elsewhere: most journals will not consider work already published, however bad the venue.

Getting the paper itself ready? The abstract check reads your abstract the way a desk editor screens it — free.