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Peer Review: Vulnerability Profile of South American Authors to Predatory Publishing Practices Using an AHP Approach

Reviewer: Julian Rodriguez, Jr., FRSA, MRES, M.ISRM

Summary:

Cordero Torres and Riofrío Romero present a practical decision-support model to help South American researchers identify and avoid predatory or vanity publishing traps. By pairing the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) with ISO 31000:2018 risk management standards, the authors map out five main vulnerability drivers. They show that aggressive publisher communications, institutional pressure to publish, and an author's career stage carry the heaviest weight in exposing researchers to fraudulent journals.

Key Strengths:

• Grounded Risk Standards: Applying the ISO 31000 framework to academic publishing shifts the conversation away from vague ethical advice and toward concrete, operational risk management.

• Methodological Rigor: Using a structured decision matrix helps strip away subjective bias when evaluating hard-to-measure risk factors like institutional pressure and career vulnerability.

• Focus on Real-World Friction: The paper rightly recognizes that choosing where to publish isn't just an individual decision—it's heavily driven by university evaluation policies and administrative demands.

Constructive Considerations / Future Work:

• Easing the Administrative Load: The "Think, Check, Submit" self-assessment tool is a great personal checklist, but future work could explore how university research offices can automate these checks so early-career scholars aren't buried in extra paperwork.

• Expanding Structural Drivers: While language barriers and funding constraints were left out of this initial model to keep the scope manageable, these real-world pressures play a huge role in driving authors toward low-cost, quick-turnaround publishers and deserve a spot in the next iteration.

Competing interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The author declares that they used generative AI to come up with new ideas for their review.