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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:40PM
There is no way these journals could exist without authors submitting papers. Who sends a paper to a journal that they've never heard of? It must be authors who are padding their CV.
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:53PM (7 children)
TFA goes to great lengths in its opening paragraphs to silence dissent. "No, it REALLY *IS* a problem!" it repeatedly proclaims.
Sure, these "predatory" journals are a problem. But I am forced to wonder what sort of problem it is and who exactly it impacts.
I don't tend to reveal a lot of personal details about myself on online forums. But I know a bit about scholarly publication. I'm currently on an editorial board for a journal. I've served as a reviewer for top-tier journals. I'm an officer in an academic society.
A lot of the concern about predatory journals that I've read about has been written by librarians and reference staff (including TFA here). They obviously are concerned about how to tell the "good stuff" from the "bad" because they need to figure out what to buy for collections, what to subscribe to, etc.
But from the perspective of an actual researcher in a field, I think the view is quite different. I receive unsolicited emails on a daily basis from what I assume are scam journals, scam conferences, scam publishers of all sorts. Well, some are likely scams. Some are variants of the old "vanity publisher" system that's been around for as long as the printing press. That is, there has always been a publishing market for people who can't get published by a "reputable" publisher. As an officer in an academic society, I've received emails directed personally to me asking if I wanted to publish conference proceedings in what I would definitely call a "vanity press." It's not a scam. Most experienced academics in my field have heard of it; and most know that if someone has published a book there, it may not be very good. Vanity presses have been charging people for centuries. Why anyone wants to claim this is a new problem with the growth of "open access" journals is a mystery to me.
Anyhow, the point is I know these are scams (or at least not serious journals). Most of the emails I receive have clear flags of spam-like characteristics. And even if they don't, I know the legitimate journals in my field. I would never submit an article for publication in a journal I had never heard of without asking some colleagues about the reputation of that journal first. Nor would any mildly intelligent academic I know. Even if an inexperienced scholar doesn't have colleagues to ask about this sort of thing, just about every legitimate academic discipline has scholarly databases and indexes available for reference that tend to index legitimate journals and publishers. (This is actually pointed out in the comments to TFA.) If you can't find a journal in standard academic indexes for your field, and you don't see work from it cited, that should be a huge flag.
So, I find it hard to believe that there are that many legitimate academics "taken in" by "predatory" journals. And most of those[*exceptions below] who are need some serious lessons in research, because they clearly don't know how to determine whether a source should be trusted.
What's the REAL problem here? Predatory journals are really a symptom, rather than the underlying problem. The problem, as referenced by the funny "dept." line for the summary here is "publish or perish." The push for publication is so strong to retain funding, to get more funding, to get tenure, to keep one's job -- it causes people to act in ways that are not good for science.
And that, it seems to me, is the strongest explanation here. It's not that people are exactly "duped" into these publications. (Yes, there are plenty of tales of sudden demands for more money for publication, etc. And there are some that are outright scams in that they never actually PUBLISH anything. But those don't seem to be the target of interest for TFA, as it's usually easier to spot a journal that actually doesn't exist.)
What's likely going on in many cases is "journal shopping." Lots of academics do it. If an article doesn't get accepted one place, they just send it out (often without modification) to another journal. And another. Experienced academics who do this know the "pecking order" of journals and will work their way down the list to less and less prestigious journals (which usually have more and more lax acceptance policies). Academics do this not because it's good for science (it generally isn't), but because of the "publish and perish mentality" that if you've done the work, it needs to be published... SOMEWHERE.
And that's where these journals come in. Whether it's because academics are actually ignorant of what qualifies as a "legitimate" journal in their field (in which case, see my argument above), or whether it's because they are willfully ignorant and don't want to check into the journal too closely because they just need another publication, or whether they voluntarily go along with these crap journals because "publish or perish," the real problem is what's motivating academics to turn to these journals.
Sure, reference librarians may find this all to be a real hassle, because they can't know every field. They can't know what the legit journals are for every discipline. But there's little excuse for most academics to know the difference for their own discipline. (*The exception I mentioned above might include scholars in less developed countries that don't have access to scholarly databases and aren't necessarily part of scholarly networks to know what's legit and what's not. I can imagine these predatory journals really ARE predatory on some of these people, and that IS a problem. Though again, it's a symptom of a larger problem -- the disconnect of researchers in well-funded and well-connected countries vs. the rest of the world.)
I'll just conclude with one quote from TFA, because it's telling about what's really going on:
To the first point, did anyone force them to pay a fee? If I submitted an article to a journal and it was accepted, and suddenly they demanded a bunch more money, that'd be a serious red flag. I'd withdraw the article immediately. Again, the only thing that could explain this is people who are so desperate to publish (maybe on a very short timeline) that they're willing to go along with such BS. The problem is the "publish or perish" culture, which is sustaining such things. If you stamp out some of these publishers, other things will emerge to take their place as long as the demand for publication is this high.
But really the last part of that quote tells all. The actual authors in many cases are likely complicit. They are ignorant... willfully so.
That's not to say there aren't serious problems here. There's a lot of deception going on from unclear fees to promising "peer review" where it doesn't happens and even stuff like where TFA mentions journals listing "members" of editorial boards who were never asked to serve on said boards, people who were unaware they were listed. But what's the real driver behind all this?? It's not legitimate academics with high-quality research getting "fooled" by so-called "predatory" journals. It's mostly desperate authors who don't know any better (or don't WANT to know any better) often with low-quality research looking for any publisher to get a line on a CV.
Until you change the "publish or perish" aspect of the system, I don't see how this is going to change. And I still don't understand why "open access" is brought into this discussion except by people with agendas against open-access. While the fees of legit open-access journals may make it easier for these "predatory" journals to suck a few people in, again, those people may have a Ph.D. but may need to take a remedial research class to learn how to determine if a source can be trusted.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday August 08 2018, @02:10PM (4 children)
One thing I noted after submitting my post is this statement quoted in the summary:
Can someone explain what the heck that parenthetical even means??
-- Publisher: "Give me more money or we won't publish your article!"
-- Author: "Uh, then don't publish my article."
-- Publisher: "We refuse to let you withdraw your paper from submission!"
-- Author: "Uh, what are you going to do to punish me? Not publish my article??"
-- Publisher: "Umm... well...."
Seriously. I don't understand what's going on here. Are authors signing some weird contractual agreement in advance that signs over rights to their research to the publisher? Otherwise, what exactly is stopping an author from simply submitting somewhere else?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday August 08 2018, @07:13PM
--Publisher: "Publish your article anyway."
If you retract your article, you obviously didn't previously know that it was a predatory journal, so there's a good chance that your paper is legit. Which will help with faking reputation of the journal.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:05AM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday August 09 2018, @07:11AM (1 child)
No. In my experience, signing a copyright form is only required after acceptance. At submission, you only have to state that you haven't published, nor submitted for publication elsewhere. But admittedly, those were not maths journals.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:59PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(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.