Why I published in a predatory journal
the-scientist.com
the-scientist.com
Scientific journals are written for a scientific audience. For the most part, scientists get very adept at identifying good articles from bad, even in well regarded journals. Thus the system polices itself, by rewarding good articles with citations and letting bad or trivial articles wither.
Unfortunately, the general public lacks that inherent skepticism, leading them to cite spurious articles from the East-Austrian Journal of Ass-scratch.
The way to judge the impact of a scientific paper is through its citation count, perhaps normalized by a typical count for that particular field.
(but yes, peer review doesn't solve this either, especially not in the current form)
Another situation: say you are the author of a dataset. Then all papers using your dataset are going to mention you, but such mentions are qualitatively different. They should not be counted in the same category.
Why would it? These are not "predatory journals," they are akin to diploma mills for quack scientists and it's a mutually beneficial arrangement. Scientists get published, and the publisher gets paid.
The only one harmed in this arrangement is a hypothetical third party, and that is dubious.
How are these guys making money? Is it just the 'editing fees' for people trying to publish? Presumably advertisers are savvy enough to not throw money at these types of journals? Proper scientists / researchers are (hopefully) also not easily fooled - and whoever peer reviewed this article (assuming it actually was peer reviewed, as claimed) won't want their name attached to the publication.
These stories come up often enough to suggest it's a well known problem, and the culprits are easy enough to identify. But that these stories do keep coming up suggests there's good money being made somehow, and attempts to thwart these publications are failing.
This has led to the inevitable unintended consequences. Most of these faculty members do not have the resources or the ability to publish in "real" journals, nor do they even understand what a good journal is. So they publish in whatever venue that accepts their paper. If it requires them to pay, then so be it. And thanks to the beauty of capitalism, a bunch of predator journals have emerged to lighten the purses of these poor folks.
Are the poor folks not getting exactly what they paid for in this instance? They wanted to be able to hit a published papers quota to get a raise/hired/not fired/whatever and the journal provided that. I don't feel like it's warranted to treat the journals customers as victims here. Both the 'predatory' journal and the customer are just playing the same shitty game set up by silly incentives being put in place by outside forces.
He means they are victims of their universities' polices.
The quoted phrase, "a bunch of predator journals have emerged to lighten the purses of these poor folks", clearly implies that the journals are out to hurt their customers.
I definitely wouldn't use "Most" here. The vast majority of faculty will publish in respected journals. Unless you can cite a source for your claim?
I don't want to pick a particular university or person to name and shame. But my suggestion would be to look at authors in the OP's journal and evaluate for yourself whether these authors are publishing in "respected" journals.
"Complaints that are associated with predatory open-access publishing include
Accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control, including hoax and nonsensical papers.
Notifying academics of article fees only after papers are accepted.
Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or serve on editorial boards.
Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission, and not allowing academics to resign from editorial boards.
Appointing fake academics to editorial boards.[34] Mimicking the name or web site style of more established journals.
Misleading claims about the publishing operation, such as a false location.
Improper use of ISSNs.
Fake or non-existent impact factors."
One could say they prey on society's trust in science.
Or perhaps the metaphor is misapplied?
Perhaps you've noticed an alarming rise in society's distrust in science, perhaps partly exacerbated by an increase in poorly peer-reviewed publications.
IEEE Access is an example of a journal which charges a hefty "article processing fee" and publishes rather mediocre papers. But I wouldn't call them a predatory journal. They do get feedback from real researchers working in the field, they do reject fake and obviously-flawed papers, and they do not just use the publishing fees to enrich themselves. The journal in the OP did none of these things.
Yes.
Fake ones like this make it off the $800 publishing fee. Since it's "open access" they just put the PDF online and call it a day. $800 isn't bad for a few hours of proofreading and updating one web page.
Also, allegedly many of these journals actually have per-paper expenses in the hundreds of dollars (!!), mostly from editor time spent soliciting and managing reviewers. That seems crazy. In contrast, major ML venues like NIPS handle all the review management in a mostly automated way and are run by volunteers. But then again, the average review quality at ML conferences seems to be pretty poor, at least compared to what I've heard about in some other fields.
I don't know if they are so evil as people say. They send me nice invitations on linkedin to interview with them :D
They appear to have interesting data and text analysis problems to solve.
the ideal is an open-access journal that is open in terms of who can read it but very closed in terms of who can successfully get an article published. that's not what we're getting these days though.
Sometimes you can take a pretty good guess who it is based on the topic and the references (e.g., citations to in-press papers on obscure topics is usually a give away). Other times, though, it's difficult to tell who the authors are.
People often also think they know who the author and/or reviewers are when they are really totally wrong. I've reviewed papers and seen other reviewers cite my papers in a way that I thought "damn, that looks like something I'd write" when it was not. Similarly, I've seen reviewers think they know who the author is when they're completely off.
I personally think anonymous reviews are critical, because it keeps some modicum of shielding of reviewers against retribution for negative comments. It's not 100% anonymous of course, but it's anonymous enough to create enough doubt about who the reviewers and authors actually are.
This must vary across disciplines. While in your field the pool of reviewers might be public, in my own field most journals keep confidential their set of preferred people to turn to for reviews.
The only real downside I see is that it allows the authors to contact and potentially bias the reviewer to affect a potential review of the written material.
v1 will be a search + reading interface for scientific articles with p2p datasources (provided as hyperdrive feeds [2]). v2 will have arbitrary features that can be used to customise the reading experience, such as marking retractions/update/expressions of concern, connecting post-publication peer reviews to articles, etc.
we're at #dat and #sciencefair on freenode, would love to talk
I cannot speak to its prestige now, however. I'm sure that its reputation was somewhat damaged by publishing this paper but I imagine it's still considered a "good" journal.
There was a strange obsession regarding looking official and academically legitimate, to the point where they would attempt to recruit professors to do the peer-reviewing, then override what they said in the final "edit" stage of the review and approve the submission anyway. Since it was anonymous, there was no way to tell if "Reviewer 3" was actually bumped or just that someone else got to that submission first.
That said, their business model was a bit different. They weren't open-access: they made their money selling conferences (which were mandatory to attend if you wanted your paper to actually get published in the journal).
Often, they would resell gifts from the venue such as comped hotel rooms and airport shuttles at above market prices to the attendees as well as part of a "package." As well, the venues usually also matched where-ever the founder wanted to go on vacation.
Out of paranoia as much as cost-cutting, they ran the offices very lean and centralized authority in the founder and his family. They probably would have had a more successful operation had they gotten good lieutenants who were better capable of maintaining the facade. My local university used to warn people off of publishing with them by name, which I thought was a remarkable step considering the precarious state of Canadian libel law.
Other staff was mostly early-stage "green card"-esque workers who they would hold the threat of dismissal over their heads (forcing those workers to rush to get a new job before they timed out and had to leave the country) and students like myself.
The year before I got there, they had a major publicity crisis in which they took substantial heat in academic circles for basically auto-publishing plagiarized articles from anybody with an email address. Part of my work was integrating one those "turn it in" style plagiarism detectors into their submission funnel.
By the end of the summer they were in deep with the tax authorities from a backlog of unpaid taxes; the founder bragged to me that he considered paying corporate income tax a kind of "game" in which the penalties for losing were insubstantial. I'm sure by now the penalties have grown in seriousness, though the last time I looked them up they still seem to be publishing journals and hosting conferences.
It was a good lesson for me about what to look out for in the future when trying to select a small business/team to work for.
Taking a University to court for calling you a fraud only gives the University a great opportunity to prove it in a public court room :)
Also you can probably interview current and former employees, like yourself. Not to talk about the presumably long list of sketchy things published, which should be sufficient on its own.
If you want to maintain some illusion of legitimacy, suing a University isn't going to get you far.
There's a place for literature review papers. They can be good starting points or useful for catching up with recent state of the art.
The government which funds the vast majority of scientific research should insist that real research is freely accessible not in these gated journals that are ridiculously expensive (as much as $25k/year for a single subscription)...so that there was an easy way to access real scientific research.
Incidentally a similar stunt was pulled with a humanities journal several years ago and the gibberish paper got published...but this was in something a lot more like a real journal.
A few years ago the Beall-list added the Frontiers journals to its list of predatory journals, which generated quite the backlash: http://www.nature.com/news/backlash-after-frontiers-journals...
There is quite a bit of 'regular' research published in Frontiers and they do have peer review, but also a lot of crap (a similar point can be raised for Nature's new Scientific Reports, but also for PLOS ONE, which all cost money to publish in). The border between 'predatory' and just 'kinda crappy' journal is hard to set. The big difference between most predatory OA journals and Frontiers is that Frontiers at least responds to criticism.
Edit: Some similar criticism on Nature Scientific Reports: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/mor...
and for PLOS ONE: http://www.omnesres.com/blog/plosone/
That's not how reputation works. There isn't a single institution who gets to say "This is good science, but this isn't", but scientists as a body can.
An institution can of course choose its own standard regarding specific journals, but it cannot impose them unto others.
Its just instead of influencing policy used to target people they deem threats, these guys simply trolling big pharam and the bureaucratic machine it has manifested.
So essentially the fake journels are selling ad space & resume fillers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
although that had different goals.
> In the decades that followed, the hoax proved to be a significant setback for modernist poetry in Australia. Since the 1970s, however, the Ern Malley poems, though known to be a hoax, became celebrated as a successful example of surrealist poetry in their own right, lauded by poets and critics such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Robert Hughes. The poems of Ern Malley are now more widely read than those of his creators, and the affair has inspired works by major Australian writers and artists, such as Peter Carey and Sidney Nolan. American poet and anthologist David Lehman called Ern Malley "the greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century".
In contrast to science publications, where the reader expects that some scientific quality standards have been met, I'd assume that the market demand will be enough to wipe out low-quality entertainment publications.
I salute your energy and your objective. Having observed individual scientists over a period of decades and noting the degree to which a modern scientist's professional life is ruled by "publish or perish", I think some very basic changes would have to take place to eliminate phony journals.
On the one hand, phony journals, and corner-cutting episodes like the recent retraction of 107 cancer research papers from otherwise legitimate scientific journals[1], only show the desperation in the lives of many scientists and pseudoscientists.
On the other hand, freedom of the press allows pretty much any nonsense to be put on paper and online, and efforts to stop phony publications often collide with a very permissive attitude toward printed expression, including those that walk a thin line between fact and fiction.
To me, the central problem is that publishers make too much money from technical and scientific publication -- it invites cheating and exploitation. Maybe in the future there will be some kind of publication arrangement that is (a) beyond reproach and (b) not undermined by absurd access prices.
1. http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/20/new-record-major-publi...
The whole sting is later analyzed in a serious scientific journal: https://sci-hub.cc/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4
Cash for publication. Sad state of science. Terribly irresponsible that this is medical science.
I'm not emphasizing blame for the individuals involved...I think the way the system operates incentivizes things that don't work to produce solid results.
A new peer review system that does work to reliably generate reproducible results would be a significant technological innovation that improves basic publicly funded STEM research.
Long term solutions for this problem often focus on (1) new systems for reviewing/publishing scientific work as a means to make number-of-publications a more accurate quantifier of the quality a researcher's body of work, or (2) incorporating metrics other than publications.
What about short term solutions? What about an IMDB-like review and rating system for publications? This way, researchers still publish wherever they like, but could be potentially reviewed by a independent system. Would such a system be too readily game-able?
This is qualitative and easily gamed though. Science can get mean and highly political. Adding a qualitative metric to scientific achievement would just give ruthless people a tool to hurt good scientists.
Science is a small world. Among your peers in the field, it's not your number of publications that matter but the quality of that work. Your results build your reputation, and that is what gets you jobs.
Hiring committees and funding authorities already rely on way too many automatic indicators such as impact factors and citation indices anyway, despite the fact that nobody has ever been called a great scientist because he or she published a lot, and, even worse than that, in the humanities people often get quoted a lot and make a career because they published a really bad article that somehow made it into a good journal. Everybody tries to correct them, they publish a few even more outraging and stubborn follow-ups and pronto - they've got their tenure. I've seen that more than once.
Besides, whether journals show up in search results or not is also not that important. This is important to find readers and followers, but what counts more for many individual researchers nowadays is whether or not publications show up in their CV.
To fix the problem, universities and funding authorities must return to putting a higher emphasis on the scientific evaluation of the actual work of scientists, evaluate their results, their approaches and how promising their line of research is, instead of bean counting. There is no other way to ensure quality other than evaluating on the basis of quality rather than quantity.
[0] https://scholar.google.de/intl/en/scholar/metrics.html
[1] https://scholar.google.de/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en...
In the end, somebody has to make a judgment call as to what a link is worth.
Let me translate this to terms people here might understand. This is like writing an O'Reilly book entitled "Essential System Administration In Client-Side Javascript" detailing a cookbook of the most common techniques you would want to use to do local system administration from Angular, React, Meteor/Ember, etc, with special attention to the pitfalls of identifying whether the local system is a Windows,Mac, Linux, a mobile browser, tablet, etc, and listing the various ways you can set up the local user's device to your own liking.
Where it crosses the line is if it's written in a highly informative way without any indication WHATSOEVER of being satire. Local system administration from javascript frameworks doesn't exist. It's not a thing. You couldn't so much as set the time.
But when you write with authority on how to do that and more, suddenly it does exist. What's more, it will be interesting and useful. If you write with authority and an overview of the subject, in the way done here (it starts by identifying the scope of the issue - the very first words of the abstract are "Uromycitisis is a rare but serious condition that affects over 2,000 mostly adult men and women in the United States each year". From the moment you've written those words -- you even say who it affects and the exceptions, since it affects adults but mostly adults -- you are now an expert and you're not writing a satire or hoax: you're writing fraud.
It would be as if I began the above with:
"Web-based administration of local devices with a standard browser serving as the remote administration client is a small but growing choice of hundreds of large companies with 5,000-50,000+ employees. Its advantages include leveraging development practices that may already be familiar, web standards, regular security upgrades from the major browsers, centralized distribution of small updates while leveraging the security mechanisms (such as HTTPS and signed certificates) already present in the browser, and cross-platform availability across many devices. Simply put, System Administration in client-side javascript is the closest you can come to fully controlling your user's devices without administrative tools at all. While it has important limitations, such as being unable to repartition hard-drives or install a standard image while the operating system is running, in other respects it enables all of the power of many administrative tools without many of the downsides. In this book we will cover some of the basic functions you may want to do, such as applying security updates, installing or removing software, creating user accounts and setting their privileges, and, in the case of Windows computers, setting up roaming profiles. Let's get started."
Is that a hoax? No, it's more like simple fraud. (Our author invented a research institution, created fake gmail accounts, etc.)
Sorry. I don't support the author in how they went about this. It would be different if what I wrote was hilarious - such as bemoaning that for the moment Apple Watches unfortunately do not support a standard browser, so you will have to break into them by finding and applying zero days for the iPhone, which are unfortunately patched regularly; a list of Russian and Chinese sources is contained in Appendix 1, and you can usually ask for a sample while promising bitcoins - but is the above paragraph I wrote hilarious? No. It's not hilarious and that means it's not okay.
[1] direct link to PDF: http://www.the-scientist.com/images/Opinion/2017/UNOAJ-04-00...
Reviewers usually have to assume on some level that those who submit articles aren't lying. They can't verify every claim. Maybe a case could be made that the reviewers in this case didn't do enough due diligence, but just because they didn't get the joke doesn't mean they're doing a bad job.
It's even worse because the report deserves to be published. As written (though I didn't read beyond the abstract and what he wrote about it), it deserves publication. This isn't like this other hoax, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair -- "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" which on its face does not deserve to be published.
I would publish this paper, and more than that, I would argue that papers like this must be published despite not finding anything about it.
Integrity is important.
Requiring the standard of scholarship to be raised to "integrity isn't enough. If I can't verify the scholarship independently then I would rather shut out exemplary papers than allow frauds through" is not going to benefit science in the long term.
Many important researchers did not come with ready-made citations. When Einstein published four groundbreaking works in the Annals of Physics[1] that tore apart the very foundations of space, time, mass, and energy, would someone Googling have found that it almost certainly wasn't a hoax?
At some point you just have to believe the papers, and prefer to believe and publish Einstein on the strength of what he's written than to deny him on the strength of a paucity of corroboration.
This exercise doesn't help anyone. The paper is just too well-written.
[1] see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers
It's a simple litmus test and while it generates many false negatives, there are almost zero false positives.
EDIT: At least, for biomedical papers... can't speak for other fields
I prefer to read a paper or article by its merits. E-mail from the author had little impact in that sense.
(Speaking for areas outside biomedical papers, for those, I don' know.)
It's not very difficult to establish a peer-review ring when you use freely available emails, and journals are increasingly aware of this [0,1]. That's why I'm often suspect of journals who let this slide, because it's a sign they don't screen very well.
In 2017, in light of the widely successful and low-barrier ways to game the peer-review system, I don't buy your "leaving an institution" argument.
Corresponding author is more commonly the professor than the main author, and faculty at academic institutions almost always have "e-mail for life" privileges.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/1...
[1] http://www.nature.com/news/publishing-the-peer-review-scam-1...
For instance, take the Annals of Emergency Medicine (http://www.annemergmed.com/). More than 50% of corresponding authors use gmail.
It's way to easy for journals to fall prey to peer-review rings when they accept email addresses that are easily spoofed [0].
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/1...