Call it stupidity or bad luck but I am guilty of submitting my research article to a journal which is listed in Beall's List of Predatory Publishers.
It is my first article and I don't have much experience publishing articles. I was searching for a top impact factor journal and found this one on Google and in excitement sent my article (word and pdf files) in this journal a few days ago, only to discover later that this might be a bogus journal.
Now I am worried about that what will happen to my article. What if they plagiarize my paper, or send it to another journal not giving me credit?
My question is that what should I do now? Should I send my article to a reputable journal now? What should be the process? What if it is flagged for fraud by that journal? What are my options?
Any help would be appreciated.
Answer
If the paper has not yet been accepted for publication, you are free to withdraw the paper from consideration. Depending on the policies of the journal to which you submit the article, you may need to disclose the prior submission, and explain why you withdrew the publication from consideration.
Unfortunately, there's little you can do to stop the publishers of the first journal from doing something unsavory with your article. You will need to exercise vigilance in monitoring the work in this area to ensure that the paper isn't mishandled or worse. Be sure to maintain records of all of the correspondence you have had with the journal—and make sure of all it is documentable—phone calls won't suffice here.
However, if all the journal has is a PDF of your original article, it makes it a lot harder to do anything with it: it is tedious work to convert it into the template that most publishers use without significant effort. Thus, without the original graphics and text files, it will be difficult for them to "transmit" the paper elsewhere.
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