SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The first solid indication of how widespread this problem really is came with last year's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) action against one of the largest and most profitable of the alleged predators, the prolific journal publisher and conference organizer OMICS, which publishes 785 titles generating over $50M in annual revenues. The FTC alleges that OMICS makes false promises of peer review in return for article processing charges (APCs), assesses those charges without disclosing them up front (then refuses to let authors withdraw their papers from submission), and lies about both the membership of its editorial boards and the names of presenters at the many conferences it sponsors - all classic examples of predatory publishing practices.
Now comes a small flood of even more alarming reports [...]
(source)
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:20PM (6 children)
I am truly surprised that people publish there and get funding for these publications. Publishing in a known predatory journal is tarnishing scientific reputation a lot. OTOH I admit when looking at CVs, I look for something like 5 best papers and hardly heed the rest, barring quantity. When I look at a google scholar profile, I look at the first page (most cited papers) and hardly heed the rest, again, barring quantity by checking total number of publications. It would be very helpful to have something like the unofficial lists, but more officially agreed upon so that statistics for individuals could be automatically generated by google or other entities.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:57PM (1 child)
And of course, there's the fact that not everyone knows they're dealing with a predatory journal.
"Oh we're open access, so we can't afford to pay for editing and review process unless you give us money for it" is something both high quality open access journals like Plos One do and the predatory scammers.
And not every professor and postdoc and adjunct is politically savvy enough to recognize which journals are complete bunk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @10:02AM
Even if they are savvy enough, they barely have time/opportunity to do thorough enough checking to distinguish some of these journals, especially considering that there have also been quite a few new arrivals on the scene targeting open access publication which do have seriously though peer review. You could guess that the only safe way would be to stick with long-time quality journals but you won't be able to meet the set constraints on publication amounts then too keep your job running for long as you'll quickly be passed by those who are less critical in their journal selection.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 08 2018, @03:10PM
Jeremy Mould. He left Caltech to head up Kitt Peak, then having established his reputation was able to return home to Australia.
He and Gary DaCosta, our second co-author, both have Wikipedia articles, yet repeated attempts BY OTHERS to write a Wikipedia article about Your Truly have always gotten voted off the site.
Despite the widespread popularity - especially among mental health professionals - I'm not regard as notable because my writing is self-published. The specific reason I self-publish is that I feel very strongly that no one should have to pay money to benefit from my hard-won insights.
The papers were all measurements of the ages of some Magellanic Cloud globular clusters. One can find the ages with a plot of each star's brightness through a Red filter with the difference between Red and Blue. The transmission curve of each filter is rigorously standardized.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday August 08 2018, @07:29PM
Those journals allow giving a “scientific” justification for some industry's agenda. The actual scientific community will immediately recognize the paper as bullshit anyway (which is why you wouldn't be able to publish it in a truly reputable journal), but the general public will be fooled if you can tell them that the study “Health Effects of Snake Oil”, published in the “peer-reviewed” Journal of Snake Oil showed that snake oil improves your health. Oh, and cyanide is absolutely not poisonous, as shown in a paper in the Journal of Totally Non-Poisonous Stuff, so don't complain about it being in our waste water!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:53AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday August 09 2018, @07:51AM
You might think so, but there is a catch. You can apply the concept of H-factors to journals to and, lo and behold, the "shitty" journals (AKA high volume) score very well (e.g. Plos One). This is due to the huge citation base they have. Every added publication can only improve the H-index it can never lower it. This is different with impact when every added article is a burden for the impact factor. In conclusion: people with a lot of publications usually have better h-indeces.