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 [...]
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(Score: 5, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 08 2018, @03:17PM (1 child)
Consider that John Forbes Nash won a Nobel for just one paper he wrote on the back of a cocktail napkin.
Surely there must be some better alternative than sheer volume.
When I was a Caltech student I took a serious stab at reading the astronomical literature. That just made my eyes glaze over so I soon gave up. At the time Astronomy was a very small field.
Surely we would all - even non-academics would benefit - were fewer but higher-quality papers published.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:03AM
If only the beancounters with the purse strings understood this.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.