> First, look to see how long the journal has been in publication.  
> Second, check a couple of university libraries to see if they own a
subscription.

I agree firmly with #1, but #2 seems less and less useful in a time of
budget cutbacks and astronomical subscription fees for serials and journals.
Libraries are dropping journals based solely on the basis that no one
screamed bloody murder when the journal was listed as "slated for
discontinuation".
Database access fees are also astronomical.
The declining number of universities subscribing to journals creates a death
spiral of ever-higher fees and ever-fewer subscribing schools.
Even inter-library loan is unable to find some papers I request, as it seem
that ILL only applies to physical paper journals in a library's holdings,
not to databases to which they have access.

One cross-check is, on a paper-by-paper basis, to see who has cited that
paper, and what else the authors have written, but this is only possible
with serials database access, or a very friendly library science major.

Another cross-check is the "impact factor" of the journal, but note well
that this metric is a tad too arbitrary, and has its own problems, debate,
and drama:
http://www.citefactor.org/journal-impact-factor-list-2014.html
It is, in essence, a rating of how often papers published in the journal are
cited in other papers.
This works great in a field like mainstream physics, but tends to be
horribly misleading in narrower ("cozier"!) fields like crystallography,
quantum chemistry and electronics, and umm... most of entomology.

The best check is to see what other papers addressing the same general
subject matter have been published in that journal, but this is difficult
without database access.

But the overt "fake journal" issue is mostly a problem of China, where
researchers find themselves in an ever escalating war of "who has published
the most papers", as they are apparently hired and managed by "pointy-headed
bosses" straight out of a Dilbert cartoon.  So, ghostwriters are hired to
write convincing-sounding bogus papers, which are then submitted to
pay-for-play journals that exist purely to extract fees from desperate
researchers merely trying to keep their publication count up with the
cheaters, so everyone becomes a cheater, or does not get promoted/hired.
Because of high fees, the fake journals reject few, if any, submissions.
Peer review is a cost, so the journals do things like solicit random people
with only loose connections to the field at issue, who pad **their own** CVs
with a notation that they are a "reviewer" for a "journal".

Most of the fraud is in medicine.  Very little is attempted in physics, as
peer review in physics is about as close to a full-body contact sport as
exists in academia, and joy is taken in the pummeling of bogus stuff.

But bee-related science has a problem too, at least since 2006... the press.
Remember Dr. Lu, who ODed bees on neonics, and called his doses "sublethal"?
He testified in front of Congress as if he was an leading expert on the
issue.
Remember "Wiki-Bee-Leaks"?  No one ever understood that the bees forged MORE
on the treated plantings than the untreated ones, as the treated plantings
were far more bloom-dense.  There are photos, and they are stark.
I could go on, but you get the idea - the press only presents things that
fit into the preconceived narrative they decide to write about, so they end
up being a platform for the extreme far ends of the spectrum of opinion.

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