Fraudulent journals charging fees to publish works by academic authors without checking the submitted articles for quality or legitimacy and without providing editing, review, or other services provided by more legitimate journals, is commonly known as “predatory publishing.”  Predatory journals deliver little to no value to their authors and flood the scientific corpus with poorly-vetted, seldom-cited articles. This grant funds research led by Kyle Siler at the Universitй de Montrйal to study predatory academic journals.  Starting with journals in a set of widely-circulated lists of predatory publishers, Siler and colleagues will begin by refining a definition of “predation”ѕ;the diverse variety of legitimate journal practices makes precise definition controversialѕ;and then compare articles published in predatory and non-predatory venues through a set of lenses: inclusion in vetted databases, citation, full-text analysis, authorship, and variability within publication. Siler and his team will produce peer-reviewed papers as well as briefings for scientific stakeholders. In addition, the researchers will release the first open-access, article-level dataset on the “dark web” of seldom-indexed illegitimate and/or quasi?illegitimate academic journals.