Between August 2022 and March 2023, the names and affiliations of 2183 American academics were found on the editorial boards of journals owned by nineteen predatory publishers. A survey email went out to 905 of them, and 195 replies were received. Twenty-six replies were uninformative. Sixty-five respondents confirmed that they served knowingly and willingly, ninety-one reported that their names were being used without their knowledge, and thirteen said that their names were being used despite requests to have them removed. Based on these results, a minimum estimate of the number of academics serving on the editorial boards of corrupt publishers runs into the tens of thousands, while the maximum exceeds ninety thousand. The former estimate uses very stringent criteria to define a predatory publisher, excluding all moderate, minor, and doubtful cases. This situation should be intolerable. The academic community is urged to take legal action.
