Predatory Publishing and the Imperative of International Productivity: Feeding Off and Feeding Up the Dominant

Inspired by Lin and Law’s discussion of “modes of international” (2013, 2014), we argue in this chapter that gaming metrics, predatory publishing, and exploiting the model of gold open access (Beall, 2012) can be partly understood as a logical response to the imperative of internationalization going wild. It enacts a different, yet dubious, alternative mode of internationalization for those researchers and institutions who fail—for better or worse—within the established mode of international, with its epistemic and economic centers in the global, Anglophone North/West. In this chapter, we zoom in on a recent misconduct case in the Czech Republic to show how the imperative of internationalization and productivity inscribed in the country’s research assessment framework impinges on institutional and individual publication strategies and produces a market for gaming in the academy.