Predatory Publishing and the Policing of Academic Peripheries

Abstract This paper examines the figure of the predator in the discourse on “predatory publishing” as an instrument of ideological production, epistemic policing, and geographic exclusion. First introduced by the American librarian Jeffrey Beall in 2010 to describe open access publishers that, in his view, exploit scholarly communication for profit while bypassing quality control, the term has since acquired symbolic weight. While ostensibly used to denote deceptive or substandard publishing practices, the label has become associated with the “global South,” reinforcing a spatial imaginary of corruption at the academic periphery. In this context, the predator, as metaphor, condenses institutional anxieties about legitimacy and authority in the global academic order. Through a close reading of Beall’s writings on the subject, the analysis traces a discourse of paranoia, in which imitation – rather than direct opposition – renders the predatory subject suspect. Drawing on postcolonial theory and critiques of academic imperialism, the paper argues that the predator functions as a mimetic threat: it reproduces the surface markers of scholarly legitimacy while remaining epistemically disqualified. This figuration enables forms of academic policing – via blacklists, indexing decisions, and institutional policies – that uphold Northern hegemony under the guise of safeguarding quality. In conclusion, the discourse on “predatory” publishing is situated within a broader crisis of academic legitimacy, where the imperative to secure “real” science against contamination reflects a cultural logic of purity increasingly visible in contemporary protectionism, where the predator, rather than an aberration, appears as a necessary fiction through which the academic order manages its own contradictions.