"Scholarly communication is the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs."
More on "Scholarly Communication in Crisis" (source: Association of College & Research Libraries)
What is a Predatory Publisher? Publishers that exist mostly in the scholarly open-access environment who charge publication fees to authors without the providing editorial/peer-reviewer services that are common in legitimate scholarly journals.
Checklist:
This video by Jeffrey Beall (University of Colorado Denver) gives an overview of predatory publishing.
(2017) Publisher Package and Open Access Journals: Are Any of Them Predatory?, The Serials Librarian, 73:3-4, 248-268, DOI: 10.1080/0361526X.2017.1389796
Clark, A. M. and Thompson, D. R. (2017), Five (bad) reasons to publish your research in predatory journals. J Adv Nurs, 73: 2499-2501. DOI:10.1111/jan.13090
Nerissa Nelson & Jennifer Huffman (2015) Predatory Journals in Library Databases: How Much Should We Worry?, The Serials Librarian, 69:2, 169-192, DOI: 10.1080/0361526X.2015.1080782
What is Open Access? Open-access is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
This short video by Nick Shockey (of SPARC),Jonathan Eisen (professor at UC Davis) and Jorge Cham (of PhD Comics) gives an overview of the history of scholarly publishing.